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Enter the world of Trevor Bauer, where nothing is taken at face value. He is a devotee of the teachings of Perry Husband, a former hitting coach who devised a theory of pitch sequencing called Effective Velocity. EV is complicated—Husband calls it "the theory of relativity but with baseball"— but it relies on a pitcher’s ability to make each pitch look the same for the first 20 feet, at which point a hitter has to decide to swing. The deception relies on a pitcher’s throwing each pitch through the same "tunnel." Bauer was not content to merely understand the concept of tunnels; he wanted to put it into practice.
According to Husband’s research, a normal strike zone, when extrapolated to 20 feet from a pitcher’s release point, measures 13 inches by 10 inches. So Trevor and his father, Warren, an engineer, built a metal contraption with a 13 by 10 opening. It is placed 20 feet from the mound, and Bauer throws bullpen sessions through it. In theory, each pitch that travels through the Bauers’ homemade tunnel will not only be a strike but will also look the same beyond the point where the hitter must decide to swing. "I call them the Bauer Engineering Crew," says Ron Wolforth, the director of the Texas Baseball Ranch, the training academy where Trevor has spent many summers. "The stuff they do isn’t in any manual. It’s Effective Velocity 501."
It’s not enough for Bauer to execute a pitch. He has to understand it, dissect it, improve upon it. He has to turn it sideways tilt his head and examine it from all angles. Performance is simply a by-product of process. UCLA coach John Savage calls him the Mad Scientist of Pitching. Wolforth, who clocked Bauer at 102.7 mph last summer, says, "Trevor always has a million questions. Some of them are ethereal, but they’re all insightful." Alan Jaeger, whose long-toss program is part of Bauer’s training, says, "He pitches with the wisdom of Greg Maddux at 33."