In 2017, Trevor Bauer did something that few pitchers due in the middle of a season, let alone the middle of a pennant race: He started using a new pitch. A slider to be exact, which he dabbled with in July and threw heavily in August. After throwing it fewer than 200 times between July and the end of the regular season, he’s already prepared to scrap it in 2018, according to Jordan Bastian.
Bauer came up with a modified slider on the fly down stretch last season. This winter, he scrapped that pitch and has focused on a slider that "hopefully will have a similar movement profile to a Marcus Stromann curveball or a Corey Kluber slurve.