MEXICO CITY – If Trevor Bauer’s return to pitch for the Diablos Rojos del Mexico is some kind of exile, well, there are worse places he could be exiled.
Like him or loathe him, and there are many in each category, Bauer, the former Cy Young Award winner, the outspoken, terminally online baseball personality, and the recipient of the longest suspension under Major League Baseball’s domestic violence policy, is a dominant pitcher in the higher-level professional leagues that exist in the vast obscurity beyond Major League Baseball.
A combination of all of those factors are why he’s in Mexico, pitching once again for the Diablos Rojos del Mexico in the Liga Mexicana de Beisbol. It may not be Major League Baseball, but the Diablos are as dominant a club over the last two years as the 101-year-old league has ever seen. Owned by Alfredo Harp Helu, the billionaire who founded Banamex and sold it to Citibank, they play in a stadium bearing the owner’s name that is major league in every way except perhaps seating capacity.
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Two years removed from putting together one of the most dominant seasons by a pitcher in LMB history and with the team chasing a third straight championship, there are worse places he could have ended up pitching on his home country’s 250th birthday.
Online, Bauer is a master of the content game, turning workouts, live batting practice, basically anything related to his baseball career into videos fans can consume. He also freely gives his opinions, which are plentiful.
Regardless of the mound he’s on, Bauer is at the center of his own baseball universe, and like him or not, there’s a lot to learn from him. He somehow mastered pitching at Mexico City’s 7,500 feet of elevation, and his knack for being able to explain the science of pitching to anyone willing to hear what he has to say is another part of the reason he’s here.
In Mexico City, “Your breaking ball doesn’t move as sharp. If you throw a sinker and it’s seam shifted, it won’t move as much. But, you know, to pitch here, you need to pitch in and you need to throw something hard away from righties. And something that’s slow to lefties that can go away from them. If you can do those three things, you can have success here,” said Diablos pitching coach Brooks Hall. “He’s also able to throw eight pitches. So he has crazy feel more than anyone else, and he’s still able to throw his curveball here. So that’s why he has success.”
His teammates, too, are excited to be able to learn from him. Some of them already have.
“When we were here together in 2024, he was the one that started to teach me the sweeper was starting to teach me the sweeper, and it’s something I’ve been using a lot this year,” said Diablos starter Justin Courtney, who could win a third consecutive LMB title with the Diablos this season. “It’s something that not everybody can do to explain things in a certain way that you can understand it. I feel like he’s done a good job of it the time that I’ve been around him, and I’m just excited to see it all more up close. I was in the bullpen in 2024 when he was starting. I’m gonna be sitting in the dugout, right, watching every pitch, and it’s gonna be great.”
Bauer’s mind was never far from Mexico City and the Diablos, as he explained at a press conference in the bowels of Estadio Alfredo Harp Helu before Friday’s series opener.
“There’s a lot of things that I love about playing here in Mexico. The fans, the energy in the stadium, the atmosphere, the players, the Diablos organization. So, it just made sense,” Bauer told the media during Friday’s press conference.
Asked what he missed the most, Bauer smiled and cracked wise.
“The food. Tacos. I gotta be careful not to get fat again,” he said. “But, I mean, the people, and the culture, I love the art. People are all so friendly. I love going around and seeing all the history here in this country as well. So, there’s a lot of things that I missed.”
Bauer’s complexities are multifold. He’s outspoken — while pitching for the Long Island Ducks of the independent Atlantic League, he told Brian Heyman of Newsday that’s he’s blackballed from MLB, though he provided no evidence to support that statement. Surely, his 192-game suspension under the league’s domestic violence policy, the longest ever handed down, gives MLB teams pause, but at a time when teams churn through more pitchers per season than ever before, he’s undoubtedly better than at least a few of the players who are getting opportunities at the highest level.
South of the border, the culture is different, and players whose off-the-field transgressions helped to put an early end to their MLB careers, including Addison Russell, Bruce Maxwell, and former Houston Astros prospect Danry Vazquez, have come to the LMB and not received significant fan backlash. Teams are looking for players who can produce at a high level even if they may have something of a checkered past, and Bauer certainly fits that description in this league.
In his return to the Diablos, Bauer showed flashes of dominance, utilizing his wide repertoire to retire the side in order in the first, while also struggling with command as the game went on.
Jesse Castillo’s weak grounder on a check swing back to the mound in the first gave Bauer his first opportunity to play to the crowd. When Castillo made no effort to run it out – perhaps he thought it was a foul ball – Bauer made his way to first and presented the ball, kneeling, to his first baseman, Jon Singleton, who accepted it for the third out of the inning.
Bauer’s first opportunity to play to the crowd came when Campeche’s Jesse Castillo made no effort to run it out – perhaps he thought it was a foul ball – and Bauer made his way to first and presented the ball, kneeling, to his first baseman Jon Singleton, who accepted it for the third out of the inning. (Photo courtesy of the Diablos Rojos del Mexico)
Bauer found himself in trouble in the fourth, having loaded the bases with no outs and Andrew Stevenson, the Piratas center fielder with a .905 OPS and 12 homers through 56 games, at the plate. Quickly behind 2-0, he battled back and struck out Stevenson with a 97 mph fastball for strike two and an 87 mph slider on which Stevenson whiffed badly, but a one-out poke just inside the third base bag by Armando Alvarez rattled into the corner for a two-run double, and the fans let Bauer know they weren’t happy, with a chorus of boos coming from the seats.
After striking out Jesus Fabela, Bauer’s was called for a balk by third base umpire Conrrado Valenzuela on his first pitch to Christian Ibarra, pushing another run across for Campeche. It was the first balk called against him since April 20, 2017, when he was the winning pitcher for the Cleveland Indians in a 6-2 win at Minnesota, nine years, six teams, and four leagues ago. Despite Bauer’s emphatic gesticulations, the call didn’t change, and the fans erupted in another Bronx cheer, this time directed at the umpires.
In all, Bauer was good enough to help the Diablos potentially win, throwing 53 of his 86 pitches for strikes and allowing three runs on five hits and five walks, striking out three in five innings of work. He wasn’t the dominant force he had been for the Diablos in 2024, but he also didn’t get run support, as Campeche held the Diablos to just two runs on five hits to take the second game of the series 4-3, a night after a frustrating loss where the Diablos allowed four runners to walk and later score during a seven-run inning.
“When do you see Trevor have more walks than strikeouts? Velocity wise, he was kind of hovering around 91 to 93 in the first two or three innings. And then when he got in trouble, you saw the 95, you saw the 96. So it’s there, it’s in the tank. So I don’t worry about that. But like I say, it’s been a few days since he had pitched, and the biggest thing was the command,” said Diablos Rojos manager Lorenzo Bundy.
“I would hope he gets five. … At least four, but I’m thinking the fifth. And that fifth one may be a modified start as far as maybe two or three innings or something like that,” Bundy said when asked how many starts Bauer would get over the remainder of the regular season. Bauer, he said, would pitch next “either Friday or Saturday. You know, right now we have six starters. The question is do we want to drop down to five? And that’ll depend on them. We’ll have a staff meeting here in the next day or so and figure that out.”
He can only pitch every fifth day, and there are only 27 games left in the regular season after the series with Campeche concludes later today, so he’ll likely make five or six starts before the regular season ends on Aug. 6.
But don’t let the results of this one game persuade you that Trevor Bauer is, as the kids would say, cooked. He got off to a slow start in 2024 when he came down to Mexico City to pitch for the Reds, too, allowing four runs on seven hits in his debut, and he missed time early that season with a stomach bug. He went on to win the LMB’s Pitcher of the Year award, going 10-0 with an ERA of 2.48 in 83 1/3 innings pitched and leading the league in strikeouts with 120. He also was second in ERA, second in WHIP at 1.04, and second in batting average against, with opposing batters hitting .216 against him.
And for the Diablos, Bauer’s addition is surely a boost, both in the rotation, as a thinker of the game, and psychologically. His ability to explain the game will make the Reds’ entire pitching staff stronger.
“I like to watch guys dominate. I think a lot of pitchers learn from that as well, just seeing what they’re being successful with and kind of repeat the same thing,” said Diablos reliever Nick Vespi, who dubbed himself “The Win Snake” after earning four victories in relief during last year’s playoff run. “I expect to see a Cy Young arm go up there and dominate teams.”
After the first game of Saturday’s doubleheader, there wasn’t access for the media, and after the second game had concluded, Bauer hadn’t stuck around.
Perhaps the newest Diablo didn’t want to give the assembled press their due, but Bauer is never quiet. He’ll undoubtedly have something to say about his return to the Diablos Rojos on social media soon enough.
Photo: Trevor Bauer of the Diablos Rojos del Mexico delivers a pitch in the first game of a doubleheader against the Piratas de Campeche on July 4, 2026. (Photo courtesy of the Diablos Rojos del Mexico)
