Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik - The MVP Machine

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

ARTHUR C. CLARKE, HAZARDS OF PROPHECY

Trevor Bauer steps onto a makeshift pitching mound at Driveline Baseball in Kent, Washington, a suburb south of Seattle. The throwing platform consists of a pair of black, rubberized weight-room mats covering a sloped plywood structure that mimics the shape and height of an actual mound. Its January 3, 2018, three months before Opening Day.

The Driveline campus, where inquisitive and often desperate ballplayer pilgrims gather to get better, consists of three buildings strewn about a drab industrial park that also serves as the site of a sewage disposal service, a glassblowing business, and a hydraulics company. Drivelines R&D building, where Bauer spends much of his offseason, is a warehouse of a place, carpeted wall-to-wall with Kelly-green artificial turf. The main entrance is a roll-up garage door, usually left open to a vista of neighboring business units beige, vertically corrugated metal facades and an asphalt parking lot where a collection of modest cars rests. Opposite the door and along the far wall of the facility, occupying nearly the entire length of it, is the bullpen-like pitching area where Bauer is to begin throwing. The home plate hes aiming for has a backdrop of black nylon netting to protect the nearby employees and desktop computers from ricochets.

At the front of the mound is a wooden board, to which cling three small tracking devices used for biomechanical evaluations. Sawdust from the recently assembled, jury-rigged contraption has spilled onto the front of the mound. So much at Driveline is improvised because what was needed was either nonexistent or cost prohibitive. But this unpolished place has become Bauers lab. Every off-season he tries to get better at something, focusing his efforts on gaining a new skill. His goal this winter is to create a much-needed additional pitch.

In his first three full seasons with the Cleveland Indians, 20142016, the right-hander was a roughly league-average starter, a useful player but far from the star he thought he could be. Then, at the end of May 2017, Bauer regressed. Hitters started crushing his fastball, giving him the worst earned run average in the majors (6.00) among qualified starters. There were calls for him to be sent to the Cleveland bullpen. His postgame press conferences grew testier and shorter; after one mid-May start, he ripped off and slammed down the television mic attached to his undershirt. Thanks to an increased reliance on his best pitch, a curveball, and greater use of his slider-like cutter, he was able to turn his season around and posted a strong second half. But he knew he could not be successful long term with the curve as his lone elite pitch, and the cutter variant he was throwing was uncomfortable and hard to command.