After no-hitter, Trevor Bauer says media pushed an old ‘bad teammate’ narrative

Trevor Bauer says even a no-hitter wasn't enough to stop the media from trying to turn the story negative.

The former Cy Young Award winner joined "Don’t @ Me with Dan Dakich" on Tuesday and ripped what he described as a long-running media effort to paint him as a bad teammate, arguing that the same narrative popped up again even after one of the best outings of his comeback.

As Fox News Digital’s Scott Thompson reported, Bauer threw a seven-inning no-hitter for the Atlantic League's Long Island Ducks in a 13-0 win over the Lancaster Stormers on Sunday at Penn Medicine Park. It was just Bauer’s second start in the United States since 2021, and he walked one and struck out seven in a scheduled seven-inning game, as part of a doubleheader, against the Stormers.

But Bauer told Dakich the coverage around him rarely stays about baseball for very long.

"It doesn’t matter what I do," Bauer said. "It is going to be twisted negatively in some way and if they can’t twist it negatively, they’re just not going to talk about it or report it."

Bauer said that has been true for years, especially when it comes to how his relationships with teammates are discussed.

"I have this rep for being a bad teammate because of a story that came out in 2011 that wasn’t even true," Bauer said. "And so that’s followed me my entire career."

Bauer did not specify which 2011 story he was referring to. But the "bad teammate" theme has surfaced in prior coverage, including 2013 reporting that cited criticism from then-Arizona catcher Miguel Montero about working with Bauer during their time in the organization.

According to Bauer, that same theme showed up again after his no-hitter on Sunday.

"So much so that when I threw the no-hitter, my infielders celebrated with each other," Bauer said. "The story that some people are trying to push is that they didn’t even want to celebrate with me, that I’m such a bad teammate that they don’t want to celebrate with me, despite all the evidence."

Bauer then pointed to what happened next as proof that the full story looked very different.

"My teammates circled around me and dunked me with a Gatorade shower," Bauer said. "They all went and signed a ball from the no-hitter, which is really cool of them. Everyone on the team signed it."

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To that point, USA Today posted a story about the no-hitter with the headline, "Trevor Bauer's Ducks teammates were hilariously unimpressed with no-hitter."

Yahoo Sports has an article on its website titled, "Trevor Bauer's extremely fake no-hitter won't have MLB teams knocking on his door."

That was part of a broader frustration Bauer expressed with how he believes stories about him are covered in general.

"There’s very few articles that ever get everything right," Bauer said. "I would say the majority of the time, a lot of it is omission too. They know something to be true and they just omit certain facts."

Bauer argued that some of the most important context is regularly left out.

"One of the worst ones is like, ‘Oh, he settled with his accuser out of court,’ and they leave it there," Bauer said. "Never mentioning that I never paid her a cent and she owes me hundreds of thousands of dollars. Like that puts a different context on settling something out of court."

He added, "They also never mention that I was never charged or never arrested."

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From Bauer’s point of view, that is not accidental.

"I think a lot of the articles are intended to be slanted a certain way," Bauer said. "They’re purposely inflammatory from a headline perspective to try to get clicks and then they don’t really reflect the situation accurately on purpose."

Bauer also acknowledged to Dakich that he has long been a polarizing figure, and he did not pretend that all of that happened by accident.

"I’m just polarizing in some ways," Bauer said. "A lot of it’s been intentional to try to draw attention to the sport of baseball and to try to market it and get more eyeballs on it."

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He added that part of generating attention is understanding what kind of personality gets people talking.

"I think for something to be interesting, you really need to have like a villain in a lot of ways," Bauer said. "And I have no problem playing that role."

Still, Bauer made clear there is a difference between being polarizing and being falsely framed. And after throwing a no-hitter, he clearly believes the attention should have stayed on the performance itself instead of immediately circling back to a narrative he says has followed him for at least 15 years.

Even when the result is undeniable, he says the story around him is already being written.