Trevor Bauer (トレバー・バウアー)

The best way to fix your curveball feel is to bounce it on purpose. If you keep pulling your curveball to the glove side or leaving it high arm side, this drill is for you. Stand across from a partner and try to bounce the ball halfway to him. Long hop, no hop. Watch the ball when it hits the ground. You want it to kick straight to your partner. That only happens with true 12-6 spin. To get that spin, your hand has to get way out in front and finish the pitch, with your middle finger pulling down on the ball. Your middle finger is what dictates the spin. If the ball kicks sideways when it lands, you've got side spin. Throw a sweeper and bounce it the same way and you'll see it. It travels one way and kicks back the other when it hits the ground. That's not what you want on your curveball. The ground gives you instant feedback. Keep throwing until every bounce kicks straight to your partner.

Don't fix your fastball in the bullpen. Fix it in catch play. My main focus today is backspinning the ball. The last couple days I've felt my middle finger coming through the ball, but not my pointer finger. So while I warm up, I'm driving my pointer finger through the ball. Catch play is where I set the right movement pattern. Once I get in the pen, I don't want to think about my fingers at all. The only thing I want on my mind is command. Hit the target. That's the split. Catch play is for setting the feel and the movement. The pen is for executing pitches. If you're still thinking about a fix on the mound, you aren't thinking about the target.

Just put the damn drying agent on the mound so the players won’t get hurt. It’s not that complicated. Umpires stomping on the mound insisting it’s safe is ridiculous for a professional league. ESPECIALLY when the solution takes 2 minutes and works really well.👸🏻

This Hitter And I Had a Funny Moment During This At-bat

This might be the first time anyone's proposed at first base during a game. Had to get a heater to the hands first. Surprised him a little bit. Then came the big question, and we got it.

Sometimes you just know you've got a hitter right where you want him. He was early on the fastball, so I bounced a curveball. No robo-ump was going to give me that one anyway.

First pitch of the seventh, 95 up and away, and Jose Abreu hits it right back at me. I flinched at the last second and it broke my leg, a seven-centimeter break down to the ankle. Six weeks out, and it cost me a Cy Young I was the odds-on favorite to win.

Here’s the facts of this situation: 1) It was pouring rain and the mound was extremely wet. You could see 6 inch slash marks where my cleats were slipping every pitch. That’s what I was pointing to. 2) I asked for drying agent to be put on the mound so it was safe to pitch in the second inning. The umpire crew obliged and fixed the mound and I had no complaints in the second inning. 3) it started raining significantly harder in the third inning. By the time I took the mound for the third, the drying agent from the second was soaked. I calmly asked to have more drying agent applied because the mound was not safe to pitch on. 4) the umpire crew refused to put drying agent on the mound again. I asked my manager and pitching coach to help translate and told them it was not safe to pitch. They agreed and asked the crew to just apply drying agent again. The crew again refused. 5) I threw warmup pitches. I visibly slipped on multiple of them. I again said it was not safe to pitch. The umpires again refused to put drying agent on the mound and said we had to start the inning. 6) I threw 4 pitches. I slipped on every one. I nearly fell over on one because my foot slipped 6 inches. I had no idea where the ball was going because my feet were slipping all over the place. That is not safe for the hitter and that is not safe for me as the pitcher. I pleaded after every pitch to apply drying agent. The umpire refused. 7) after the fourth pitch I refused to throw any more pitches because I was not willing to tear a hamstring or groin or knee in those conditions. So finally the umpire crew asked the grounds crew to apply drying agent. At the same time, they correctly decided it was raining way too hard to continue playing so they pulled the tarp. 8) we had about 90 minutes of delay. When the grounds crew pulled the tarp off the field and looked at the mound, they said they needed 45 minutes just to get it in playable condition. So decide what you want about the situation, but those are the facts. And I have all of this in the vlog, which will be out in a couple of days, so everyone can hear for themselves what was going on.

Trying to see your sweeper move is what messes it up. When you throw a sweeper, you want to watch it move sideways. So it's really easy to start drifting forward with your torso while you throw it, almost like you're leaning out to watch it break. The problem is that you stop getting through your normal delivery. Your body does something different on the sweeper than it does on your other pitches, and the pitch suffers for it. So get through your normal delivery on it. Same move you make on every other pitch. Don't lean forward chasing the break. Then check the spin. If the pitch has too much front spin, the axis is off and it won't move laterally the way a sweeper should. Adjust until the axis is right and the ball sweeps. Same delivery, right axis. That's when it starts to look good.

He Doubled Off Me… Time to Respond

An offspeed pitch 4 to 10 mph off your fastball gets almost no swing and miss. There's a weird triple range for how far off your fastball a pitch should be. 10 mph or more off your fastball: it gets a lot of swing and miss based on speed alone. The hitter is geared up for the fastball and is way out in front. Between 10 and 4 mph off: it gets basically no swing and miss. You'll get a lot of off-barrel contact, but the speed gap is too small to fool timing and too big to hide. 4 to 0 mph off: it gets a ton of swing and miss again. Hitters can't tell it apart from the fastball out of the hand, so the movement is what beats them. That's the game Yamamoto plays. His splitter is 92 and his four-seam is 96. You can't see the difference, but one has about 2 inches of vertical break and the other has 20. So the hitter tries to stay on top of the four-seamer, and that's the worst possible swing for a splitter. Know how far each of your pitches sits off your fastball, and what that speed gap is actually going to get you.

My big league success started when I stopped throwing so many fastballs. The Indians wanted me throwing 55 to 60% fastballs. But my curveball was my best pitch at the time. So I started throwing a whole bunch of curveballs, to righties and to lefties. That's when I started having a lot more success. It's easy to get obsessed with pitch percentages. What should my mix be? I have five pitches, so I should throw them all, right? That thinking gets in the way. You don't have to figure it out on your own. The hitters will generally tell you what your best pitch is. The stats will generally tell you too. Once you know, throw it the most. Your best pitch is your best chance of having success, so throw it a lot. Having five pitches doesn't mean you have to use all five. Use the one that gets hitters out.

I Took on a Former Tigers Prospect

Your kick change should feel like your middle finger got chopped off. The whole idea of a kick change is that you're throwing a splitter with your ring finger and your pointer. The middle finger's only job is to get out of the way. The most common mistake is a grip that's too tight. If your fingers sit too much on top of the seam and too close together, you end up behind the ball, and it won't do much. Spread your ring finger and pointer wider. You want it to feel like the ball is slipping out between those two fingers. Your middle finger just rests on top of the ball. It naturally pushes the ball forward a little, but it isn't doing the work. Your thumb isn't pushing the ball either. It just holds the ball in place and acts as a guide. Keep as little tension in your hand as you can. The more tension you have, the more likely the ball is to stay in your hand, and that's not what you want on a kick change. You want it to slip out.

When I pitch badly, it's usually because I go to the target too early. If you rush forward at the start of your delivery, you run away from your back side. Then you don't have anything left on your back side when you need it. I use 3 cues to fix this. 1. Relax and go slow in the beginning. Trust that the power is going to be there at the end. You don't have to force it early. 2. Elevate your glove side. Sometimes I think about taking my glove straight up into the sky. It doesn't actually end up that high, but thinking about it helps me stay back a little bit. 3. Keep your head over your back foot. Don't lean backwards. As you move forward, let your head stay over your back side instead of diving at the target. I have this same problem. I look at the target and want to go get it. When I'm good, I stay back, and then everything lines up.

Most pitchers mess up the slide step by going forward first. When you go forward first, you run away from your back leg. That's why the slide step feels so off for a lot of guys. It's also why everyone feels better in the windup. You get a leg kick, and the leg kick has to come down. So you're naturally thinking down first, without trying to. In the slide step, your center of gravity is already in front of your back foot. You don't need to push forward. If you just drop, you go. That makes everything way simpler. I've noticed it gets everything on time easier. At first I was getting a little late, but now my only cue is breaking my hands. When I break my hands, the drop happens without me thinking about it too much. People overcomplicate the slide step. Drop your back leg, then throw the ball.

It doesn't matter how your hips get open. It only matters that they are. Every pitcher's body moves differently. My hip doesn't rotate much at all. I don't have the range of motion for it. Mason Miller's back knee goes way in. Chapman works from the inside. Sasaki gets both legs open and then everything just spins. They all look different, but they're solving the same problem. When your front foot lands, your hips need to be open enough that you can rotate. If your hips are still closed at landing, there's nowhere to rotate. Everything just goes forward instead of turning. So don't copy someone else's knee or hip position. Your body isn't built like theirs. Figure out how your body and your hips get open by landing. Maybe it's your back knee turning in, maybe it's turning out. However you get there, that position at landing is what really matters.

First start in the DR

Most pitchers try to throw harder with their arm. That's exactly why they're stuck. The arm doesn't generate the velocity. The shoulders do. The arm is just along for the ride. Here's what actually happens in a good throw: The arm gets loaded back. The scapula hits full end range. Then the shoulders rotate as hard and as far as possible — and the hand just slicks out front on its own. You don't drive the hand. You rotate the shoulders and the hand follows. When I'm throwing well, it goes: load, full scap end range, shoulder rotation, hand out front. In that order. The arm is relaxed the whole time. When I'm throwing bad, my arm hits this position and I stop rotating. The arm lands and absorbs instead of whipping through. The shoulder stops doing its job and the arm tries to compensate. That compensation is what kills velo and destroys arms. Playing catch makes this worse if you're not careful. You get lazy. You stop rotating the shoulders and just deploy the arm out to the side. Do that enough and it becomes your default. The fix is simple but hard: relax the arm completely and rotate the shoulders as far as they'll go. The longer you wait and the more relaxed the arm stays, the more the shoulder rotation can do its job. Tension in the arm cuts the rotation short. People chase hand speed. Chase shoulder rotation. The hand will take care of itself.

Most pitchers are training wrong in-season — and they're doing it by working too hard. Here's the thing nobody talks about: you already get your volume in the game. Every pitch, every sprint, every explosive movement on the mound — that's your volume work. So when you go into the weight room and grind out high reps or long runs on top of that, you're not building fitness. You're just stealing energy from your next start. The fix is simple: 2 sets of 3 reps at 95% of max. That's it. That keeps your muscles firing without digging into your recovery. It's not flashy. It doesn't feel like much. But that's the point. I used to train heavy AND high reps when I was younger. Lots of running in August and September. I thought I was putting in the work. I was actually just getting in my own way. Now I know where my weak link is: power. Not volume. I can throw 120 pitches and not get tired. Volume is not my problem. So why would I spend time training it? The smart move is to attack what you're actually bad at. For me that's strength and power. So that's where my time goes in the weight room — heavy, low reps, high intensity, low fatigue. Train your weaknesses. Maintain your strengths. Don't let the weight room wreck your game.