Indians: Dodgers gave foolish amounts of money to Trevor Bauer

The Los Angeles Dodgers decided that two good years of baseball meant Trevor Bauer was worth $102 million over three years.

While we don’t want to be mean to the Los Angeles Dodgers, but they just gave Trevor Bauer $40 million a year for the next two years. If there were bigger suckers in baseball, they’d be the Mets. Oh, wait…Bauer is the baseball version of a time-share because everyone is going to be in his head all season long.

Bauer, in his career, has an ERA of 3.90, a winning percentage of .540, has only hit 200 innings pitched once, and only hit 200 strikeouts twice. While he does have one Cy Young to his name, he also only has one All-Star selection to his name as well. Making it more likely that his Cy Young season was more “fluke” than “expectation”.

In fact, speaking of things he only has one of, did you know Bauer has the same number of postseason wins (1) as he does playoff games missed because he chopped his finger open with a racing drone (1)?

What we’re ramping up to is that the Dodgers gave Bauer $40 million a year to be the streakiest and most unreliable ace in modern baseball history.

People seem to forget you don’t get better after 30, you get worse. Before 30, he had six of seven seasons of over 4.00 ERA baseball in Cleveland. In fact, if we’re being honest, he only has 248 out of a possible 1190 innings worth of sub-3.00 ERA pitching.

For all he did in 2020, people forget that only one of his regular-season starts came against a team with an above-average offense. That changes in the NL West. Even if he wins another Cy Young, which he won’t, odds aren’t on his side that he lives up to the tune of $40 million.

There’s every chance the deal blows up in the face of the Dodgers, after all, Bauer’s got some issues to work on. Remember the time he harassed a college student for days on Twitter? He was 28-years-old when he did that. Too old to claim he didn’t know better. Bauer’s easily rattled, clearly. The guy doesn’t just lose, he loses dramatically.

Trading him was the best move the Indians could’ve made, even if the return investment was only a 143-year-old Ricky Henderson. The Dodgers are now saddled to the worst person in baseball and the most streaky of pitchers the Indians have ever had.

Good luck, LA, you’re going to need it.