Keeping up with the Bauers
On Andruw Jones and baseball's selective morality
Content warning: domestic and sexual violence
Every few weeks, speculation spreads that Trevor Bauer is on the brink of returning to Major League Baseball. Bauer has not pitched in an MLB game since June 2021, when he was reported to be under investigation for assaulting a woman in Pasadena — the first of at least four known sets of partner-violence allegations to be made public1 — and that is highly unlikely to change. Yet it remains a recurring discussion point online. Sometimes it comes from a blogger seeking controversy-clicks by claiming that Bauer’s numbers in Japan and Mexico over the last two years are too good for MLB teams to ignore. Occasionally the rumor comes from Bauer’s camp, painting him as an unfair victim of cancel culture run amok. And while it’s unlikely that any organizations are actually considering signing Bauer at this point, one can theoretically imagine an interested team official planting the idea with a friendly writer as a trial balloon to gauge what public reaction would be.
Luckily there is little appetite for Bauer returning to the big leagues, at least among the writers from whom I get my baseball news and analysis. When speculation about him signing with an MLB team shows up on my social media feeds, it’s because people are dunking on it. It is to the baseball analytics community’s credit that few if any of its prominent voices are interested in seeing Bauer suit up in the Majors ever again.
Yet it makes it all the stranger that so many fans and I writers I respect believe Andruw Jones should be in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
In December 2012, Jones was arrested for allegedly dragging his wife Nicole down the stairs and threatening to kill her. He subsequently pled guilty to the charges and Nicole filed for divorce (they later reconciled). Despite our cultural trend of taking such things more seriously, Jones has steadily increased his share of support on the Baseball Writers’ Association of America’s annual Hall of Fame voting, reaching 62 percent in 2024, his seventh try. He needs just a 13-point jump in this year’s incipient election (an increase he has exceeded twice in the last four years) to reach the 75 percent threshold for Cooperstown admission.2
There is no good solution for how to deal with partner-violence offenders in the Hall of Fame. Plenty of monstrous humans’ busts adorn the Cooperstown plaque gallery, and it feels anachronous to start enforcing stronger moral standards nearly a century after the Hall’s inception. Yet I have come to believe that being credibly accused of domestic or sexual violence should be disqualifying for new members. A lack of clear and consistent criteria for Cooperstown selection is a sunk cost — the precedent of including Rabbit Maranville but not Lou Whitaker, to take one confusing example, offers no logic for us to follow and apply to future selections.
Therefore we must accept our own agency for the values we uphold. I posit that making the Hall of Fame marginally less incomplete is not worth the pain it may cause to survivors of partner violence when someone who committed similar abuses receives such adulation. Reasonable people may disagree on this, but I believe it’s important to be honest about what choosing to ignore players’ off-field behavior actually means.
Jones is the only candidate with such baggage who stands a reasonable chance of being inducted this year, but there are three more players on the ballot who face such allegations. Writers also seem disinterested in the charges against Manny Ramirez (who got just 33 percent support in 2024, less than half what he needs for induction) and Francisco Rodríguez (8 percent), as Ramirez’ history of taking performance-enhancing drugs has proven a more-salient scandal, and Rodríguez is seen as a fringe candidate who does not warrant much discussion. I’m aware of only one BBWAA voter who has named domestic violence as why they did not vote for Jones and Ramirez. Perhaps some people do not know about these issues, but that should not be the case for the Cooperstown voters, who by definition are veteran journalists who have spent at least a decade covering the sport. Casual fans’ lack of awareness also reflects the writers’ own priorities, as it is a function of what they choose (not) to cover.
The third, Omar Vizquel, is a rare example of voters considering a candidate’s off-field behavior: his 18 percent last year is barely a third of the 53 percent he peaked at before a myriad of disturbing allegations against him came out. Strangely, based on a few minutes of simple name-matching from publicly revealed ballots, I identified at least 53 voting members of the BBWAA who voted for Vizquel before his scandals broke, stopped voting him in 2021 or 2022, and still rationalized checking Jones’ box in 2024.
What is the logic of a moral outlook by which Trevor Bauer should not be welcomed back to Major League Baseball, but Andruw Jones deserves its highest honor?
This question will remain unfortunately relevant going forward. When presumed first-balloter Miguel Cabrera becomes eligible four years from now, will anyone remember his 2009 domestic violence incident? Aroldis Chapman figures to have a reasonable shot despite the electorate’s stinginess with relievers. Will the voters care that he allegedly choked his girlfriend in 2015? Someday the Veterans Committee will reevaluate the Steroid Era’s most-infamous dopers through a more sympathetic (and contextually appropriate) lens. Once PEDs are no longer enough to keep Ramirez, Barry Bonds, and Roger Clemens out of the Hall, will there be space to consider the things far worse than cheating that they are alleged to have done?
I firmly believe that there is a connection between Jones’ Cooperstown momentum and the persistent speculation that Bauer will make an MLB comeback. Maybe a zero-tolerance policy for such cases is the wrong approach anyway; certainly there are advocates for abuse survivors who say as much. But in a culture where athletes’ unconscionable behavior can be compartmentalized, anyone can hope that theirs will be. Take it from Bauer, who publicly speculated that the Pittsburgh Pirates picking up Aroldis Chapman last offseason meant they would be open to signing him too.
As cynical as it sounds, I suspect Bauer’s legal issues are not the reason why his MLB career is (probably) over. Rather, it’s because Bauer is so obnoxious even beyond what he’s been accused of. Many such celebrities stay quiet and wait for redemption arcs to get projected onto them. That’s not in Bauer’s nature. He would be a clubhouse headache in a way that Marcell Ozuna and Domingo Germán are not reputed to be.
If you think such behavior should constitute a red line for athletic adulation, as opposed to it depending on whether the player was already disliked, the best way to ensure that is to stick to it. A vote for Andruw Jones is a vote against clear moral standards in baseball. These are not the values I want to enshrine.
One of the four accusers has since been indicted for fraud.
Jones’ on-field performance is not the point of this essay, but for the record I do think his playing accomplishments would otherwise be Hall-worthy.