On the night he took home his first career Cy Young Award, free agent Trevor Bauer responded to Sandy Alderson’s recent comments about Bauer’s personality being a good fit for New York and good for baseball overall.
On Tuesday, Alderson said that Bauer “would be a great personality in New York,” and that “he’s the kind of guy that fans would embrace.”
“This is an entertainment business,” Alderson said in an interview with WFAN. “We’ve got to be open-minded about how players express themselves. The thing that’s interesting about Bauer is he brings along with him a lot of ideas, a lot of routines, a sort of technical orientation that I bet we can learn from. If a guy can perform. It doesn’t really-- to me as long as it’s not disruptive in the clubhouse and basically if guys see someone performing, they’ll live with whatever the baggage is.”
.jpg)
Bauer, speaking following his Cy Young win on Wednesday, said that he saw Alderson’s comments and was struck in particular by one thing the new Mets president said.
“I heard Sandy’s comments, and it was refreshing to hear him speak that way about me,” Bauer said, via MLB.com’s Anthony DiComo. “In the past, a lot of the narrative surrounding me is I couldn’t handle a big market, a big media market, I was a head case, or whatever the case is, that’s kind of been the narrative. So to hear that someone as high-ranking as Sandy feels the way he feels about that is refreshing and good to hear him speak like that. I’m certainly very appreciative of that.
“I also kind of zeroed in on one of the things he said, which is, ‘Baseball’s an entertainment business.’ We are an entertainment business, and I think that’s a view that I share. It’s something that I’m passionate about. I certainly would like to move that initiative forward, because I think that the players will be better for it when they start looking at it that way. Yes, you are paid to play baseball and to win on the field obviously, but you can’t do that 24/7. So if you can maximize your time and buy into the entertainment side of things, there’s so much opportunity for players to do things like that, and I think that the culture of baseball has slowly begun to shift in that direction.”
The 29-year-old ran away with 2020 NL Cy Young voting, and rightfully so, as he pitched to a 1.73 ERA, 2.88 FIP, and 0.795 WHIP this past season.
Now that the Mets have retained Marcus Stroman via the $18.9 million qualifying offer, a three-headed monster at the top of the rotation consisting of Jacob deGrom, Bauer, and Stroman (not to mention Noah Syndergaard, who may miss the start of the season as he recovers from Tommy John surgery) could be a possibility for the Mets.