Why local boy Bauer won't be babied: He's got too much Hart

Photo from JaegerSports.com
Trevor Bauer, then of Hart High in Newhall, poses with Alan Jeager.

That's the headline on the story Sports Illustrated has this week on Trevor Bauer, the UCLA pitcher drafted No. 3 overall by the Arizona Diamondbacks and expected to be called up when rosters expand at the end of this month.

The piece by Lee Jenkins (linked here) explains far more in depth about how, when Bauer was 12, he started working with Valley pitching guru Alan Jaeger, the former CSUN infielder who started his own pratcial theories about long-toss and later helped tutor players like Barry Zito and Dan Haren.

"Once he was warm, Jaeger urged him to let fly," wrote Jenkins. "Trevor would bike to a park near his house with a milk crate full of balls and hurl them 300 feet against an adjacent tennis court's fence before the pro ran him off."

Bauer was a sophomore at Hart High when he studied Tim Lincecum's freakish delivery and broke it down like a physics lesson.

"It started making sense why he did what he did," Bauer says, standing to demonstrate. "The more you delay your hip and shoulder from opening up, as long as you're moving toward home, you're shortening the distance to the plate and adding tension to the body, stretching the elastic band. If you fire your back hip and keep the front side of your body closed, you get more torque. The more torque you get, the more impulse you will get when you release."

Translating to more money you'll make in the big leagues. A good read.