Indians pitcher Trevor Bauer has found a way to make Aroldis Chapman look like Jamie Moyer. He can throw 117 mph, as long as he takes a 10-step running start, jump in the air and uses a tiny baseball.
If you read Lee Jenkins’s 2011 profile of Bauer in Sports Illustrated, you already knew all about Bauer’s crazy training methods. He and his dad used to cut baseballs open and fill them with sand and fishing weights, or they’d stick nails into softballs. He grew up using an aggressive long-toss program and would go to a ranch in rural Texas every summer to work out with a coach who preached an unorthodox approach to training.