Trevor Bauer sarcastically spirals after MLB rule change announcement

Los Angeles Dodgers righty Trevor Bauer has always been a talker, even during the recent months-long legal proceedings that led to his separation from the rest of the team (and extrication from MLB at large).

While the league has yet to render a decision on whether or not Bauer will be suspended for portions of the upcoming season — after all, they have a lot of other things to render — the controversial hurler was up in arms over the reported decision to make a number of rule changes to the 2023 slate.

Again, a series of decisions that were made before the 2022 campaign was even assured. But we’ll deal with that in a bit.

On Sunday afternoon, word leaked that, despite their myriad other current disagreements, MLB and the MLBPA reached an accord banning defensive shifts, enlarging bases and implementing a pitch clock for the 2023 season.

Some baseball purists, immune to the realization that minor-leaguers swear by the pitch clock, knee-jerk hated this, considering all change to be poor change. Needless to say, Bauer was among them. He began to sarcastically spin out at the suggestion of alterations while the league has bigger fish to fry.

Dodgers’ Trevor Bauer has aggravated reaction to banning the shift

He’s … not wrong.

The shift, though it may look stale and predictable by now, is a strategy that ensures a defense’s best chance of stopping a hitter from succeeding. It’s a data-driven approach to limiting hits. Why would defenses actively opt against performing as well as they possibly can? The league and players have now shaken hands, agreeing to kneecap defense at the expense of offense. A mandate for “all fastballs” could very well be coming, too.

Oh, but Bauer didn’t stop there. In case you didn’t understand his first joke, Bauer came up with 18 more examples of things the league could theoretically ban, none of them heightened from the previous pitch.

Before Bauer was done, he did get one self-deprecating shot by bringing the Fernando Tatis Jr. beef back to the forefront.

Smart move, actually, considering many of us probably forgot the 2021 storylines during the 2022 dead period.

We understand where Bauer’s coming from, but there are also more urgent concerns in the MLB landscape than these snuck-in-there rule changes.

Glad to see the union and league come together and implement sweeping changes for a sport that’s currently in stasis mode, though!

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