Steve Webb
LOS ANGELES — As details emerged on Tuesday regarding the sexual assault accusation/restraining order against Dodgers starter Trevor Bauer, it becomes increasingly clear that Bauer’s reckless behavior, regardless of the eventual criminality of it, has put the Dodgers in a no-win situation. These explosive charges will cast a pall over the rest of the Dodgers’ season, and it is hard to see the Dodgers moving past them with Bauer still on the roster.
If you haven’t read all the charges yet, you can read them in detail here. I will spare the readers who do know about them a pointless rehashing of the grisly details. Suffice it to say, they’re bad. Like, horrifically bad. Taken on their face, the accusations certainly are enough to put Bauer behind bars for a while. This is so far beyond Julio Urias’s altercation with a woman in a parking lot, it’s almost on a different planet. And if the accusations are true, there is an innocent woman that Bauer has brutalized for his own sick pleasure.
Here’s the problem. Bauer says he’s got evidence proving that this is EXACTLY how the woman asked that she be treated by Bauer, that the violence was sexually stimulating to her. Bauer, through his lawyer, contends that he was merely complying with what she wanted. So, one could imagine a scenario where Bauer meets with this woman a couple of times, they have this sort of rough kinky sex, and then Bauer breaks it off. The woman gets angry and decides to use this consensual behavior against him.
Of course, you and I have absolutely no idea which one of these stories is true, nor will we ever. And probably the truth is somewhere in the gray area between the two stories. Nevertheless, I think that if charges are filed, the Dodgers need to release Bauer immediately. Here’s why. It shows horrible judgment. Of course, Trevor Bauer is an adult and he can do anything in the bedroom that he wants, but in what world did this kind of a hook-up make sense to him? How could he have possibly thought that it would end well? Because, as we all know, when it comes to sex, very few people think clearly. And Bauer was just arrogant enough to think that he could do whatever he wanted without any consequences.
So, even if he is completely innocent, which I’m not at all certain he is, he has jeopardized a century-old, multi-million-dollar corporation of which he has been an employee for a mere five months. He has put the seasons of good, hard working men and women and their families below his own carnal desires. When he first signed with the Dodgers, I wrote an post about the signing and I diplomatically used words like “mercurial” and “a bit of a flake” to describe Bauer, but the writing was on the wall about Bauer’s character long before he put on a Dodger uniform. Trevor Bauer simply does not fit the Dodgers’ brand.
The Dodgers aren’t a team of renegades and free spirits. They are not the 1978 Yankees. Chavez Ravine is not the Bronx Zoo. Think of the face of the franchise for the last decade, Clayton Kershaw. The guy literally married his high school sweetheart and builds orphanages in his free time. That is the kind of character that Dodger players should aspire to. Now of course, not every player on the team is going to be a saint. These are young men, full of sexual energy we’re talking about here. But at least, whatever off-the-field exploits that they’ve gotten into over the years have been consensual.
Trevor Bauer has given the Dodgers’ reputation a black eye, and one that is not going to heal quickly.
