TORONTO — An Indians win Monday night at Rogers Centre wraps up this American League Championship Series for all intents and purposes, and it might accomplish a secondary initiative, as well.
Call it Redemption of the Nerd.
If Trevor Bauer can keep the Blue Jays as quiet in Game 3 as did his teammates in the first two games at Progressive Field, then he’ll have scored one for everyone who has suffered the indignity of a drone-related injury.
More important, he’ll have made up for that injury, a cut to his right pinkie Friday morning, which forced the Indians to shuffle their already beaten-up starting rotation. Bauer and Josh Tomlin flip-flopped their Game 2 and Game 3 assignments, with Tomlin leading the Indians to a 2-1 victory and a 2-0 lead in games.
“Obviously, you feel bad,” Bauer said Sunday. “Just one of those things. Freak accident you can’t really control. And [you] try to maintain a positive attitude the whole time.”
“As long as he can pitch,” Cleveland second baseman Jason Kipnis said, “it is what it is.”
Therein lies the rub: Bauer, whose reputation as an eccentric precedes him, shined in the biggest public-relation test of his career on Sunday, taking full ownership of his accident and displaying impressive self-deprecation skills. The real test, however, arrives Monday night on the mound, against a Blue Jays team desperate to win and in front of a passionate enemy fan base.
“It was just a freak accident,” first baseman Mike Napoli said, before the Indians worked out at Rogers Centre. “He says he’s ready to go, so I guess we’ll see tomorrow.”
Bauer, who said he majored in mechanical engineering at UCLA, described himself as “a big nerd” and explained how drones first interested him in 2013 when he saw video of them that reminded him of the speeder bikes in “Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi.”
(Inexplicably, Bauer said his favorite “Star Wars” movie is “Episode I: The Phantom Menace,” because of Darth Maul’s double-sided light saber and theme song. Yeesh. He really is a lone wolf.)
The 25-year-old brought the drone with him to the news conference, a smart move, and showed how one of the propellers “spun up at max throttle” and sliced open the top, outside part of the pinkie — “It’s just skin,” Bauer said — requiring 10 stitches. Seeing the drone, not much larger than your random model airplane, you’d be stretching logic to call it fundamentally dangerous.
“He feels really bad,” Indians manager Terry Francona said of Bauer. “Saying that, he was messing around with his drone. He wasn’t out in some alley at 3 o’clock in the morning and got cut on a beer can. … It wasn’t like he was waterskiing. He just cut his finger. It wasn’t remotely malicious.”
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A throwing session Saturday produced “very, very minimal bleeding,” said Bauer, who added, “I can imagine with two more days, that will completely stop. I don’t anticipate that being an issue at all.”
Ballplayers at the office aren’t terribly different than the rest of us. They tolerate their co-workers’ quirks as long as those quirks don’t impact them. Bauer’s drone mishap already impacted the club’s plans, but Tomlin took his starting rotation mate off the first hook.
Now comes the second hook. Bauer can prove that his hobby is as harmless as stamp collecting. Or he can steer this series back in the Blue Jays’ direction, the injury’s actual influence less of a factor than the bad optics, and turn this into a punch line for years to come.
“Like I said,” Kipnis said, for the third time in a 51-second interview, “as long as he can pitch and win a ballgame, I don’t think anybody has a problem.”
The baseball world will be watching — via TBS’ cameras, not a drone’s — with curiosity.