Trevor Bauer gets support from Ducks fans despite rough start
Trevor Bauer turns over the ball to Ducks manager Lew Ford during an Atlantic League baseball game against the Gastonia Ghost Peppers in Central Islip on Sunday. Credit: Peter Frutkoff
Trevor Bauer pitched a 15-strikeout gem — a franchise single-game record — for the Long Island Ducks on Tuesday against Gastonia. He opposed the Ghost Peppers again on Sunday, pitching against eight of the nine hitters he faced five days earlier.
This time, however, Bauer wasn’t quite the superhero he mostly had been with the Ducks.
Gastonia’s Justin Wylie hit a three-run homer to centerfield in the first inning in a 6-5 win over the Ducks at Fairfield Properties Ballpark in Central Islip.
Bauer (4-1), who did not get the decision, allowed five earned runs, eight hits and two walks in five innings, striking out seven.
He described the homer as a “mental and physical mistake.”
“It was a shaky start for sure,” he said. “I think they actually did a really good job of adjusting based on my approach last game. They were clearly looking for off-speed stuff . . . Five days ago I struck them out a lot on 0-2 off-speed pitches. I wasn’t sharp today by any means, but the credit goes to them on that.”
Bauer’s ERA went from a league-leading 1.41 to 2.43, second behind York’s Nick Mikolajchak’s 2.01 among pitchers who have thrown at least 20 innings in the Atlantic League. Bauer has pitched 37 innings to Mikolajchak’s 22 1⁄3. Bauer leads the league in strikeouts with 56.
Bauer’s second pitch of the game hit Anthony Prato and Bryson Brigman singled. Both advanced on a wild pitch before Wylie’s homer.
“At first, he was trying to get a feel for things,’’ catcher Gavin Collins said. “He didn’t have the feel he usually has at the beginning of the game, so it was taking him a second to settle into that.”
Bauer threw 97 pitches in the first five innings before coming out for the sixth. He allowed two hits on eight pitches before handing the ball to manager Lew Ford and exiting to a standing ovation.
Bauer, the 2020 National League Cy Young Award winner, last played in the majors in June 2021 and was released in January 2023 by the Dodgers after serving a 194-game suspension for what MLB deemed a violation of its domestic violence/ sexual assault policy. He was not charged and has denied any wrongdoing.
Bauer, whose next start is not officially scheduled yet, is no stranger to online criticism from those who don’t care for the 35-year-old pitcher. After a rough start, those comments could resurface, but he said he won’t pay any attention to it.
“Being out of the States for four, five years playing, all you hear is all the negativity,” he said. “All the leeches who just make their money talking about people for a living that parrot the same stuff.
“No matter how much I know it’s not true, that kind of seeps in. Like maybe I’m not really welcome, but coming out and seeing the fan support, it’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, Twitter is not a real place. The fans do love me.’ ”
He added, “When you look at all the fan support in person and real actual people — physical human beings acting like physical human beings, not online bots — everything is 100% positive,” he said. “If you go on X, you’d assume everyone hates this guy. But if you go in person, it’s completely the opposite.”
Alsander Womack’s two-out single on a full count in the bottom of the sixth drove in Chris Roller to tie the score at 5-5. Scott Alexander took the loss when he came in for the seventh and allowed two hits and the go-ahead unearned run.
The game ended controversially. Jacob Robson appeared to be safe at the plate but was called out in the bottom of the ninth when he tried to score the tying run on Marcus Chiu’s single to leftfield. Ford ran out of the dugout to argue with plate umpire Ruben Ramirez, to no avail.
Collins went 3-for-4 with an RBI and a walk, bringing his batting average to a team-high .354. He credited Robson’s mindset from a hitter’s meeting of going “1-for-1” in each at-bat, leaving the last one in the past.
He said a crowd of 5,852 — just short of max capacity at 6,002 — helped. “It makes it super-fun to show up to the yard,” he said.
Michael Sicoli covers high school sports for Newsday. He graduated from Quinnipiac in 2022 and left with a master’s degree in sports journalism in 2023.
