CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Trevor Bauer enjoys paintball.

And building quadcopters. And trying his hand at hip-hop. And reading articles about technology. And learning about robotics.

He saw a little wrist-mounted crossbow that shoots small carbon-fiber darts. That captured his attention. He'll go to the movies by himself or watch Duke basketball on TV or do puzzles or read riddles, activities that force him to think and stay mentally active.

When he submits to these hobbies' demands, however, he has one prevailing thought: He could instead be devoting that time to studying his pitching mechanics.

It's an eternal battle with opportunity cost, an internal struggle to which he is willing to succumb. Bauer is wired to break everything down into a linear process, whether it's his delivery, the construction of his copter or the elements of his Chipotle burrito. The quirk stems from his upbringing; his father is a chemical engineer. Bauer majored in mechanical engineering at UCLA.

The obsession with processing and analyzing information, coupled with his endless quest to acquire every answer, has him spending his non-pitching days watching video on his iPhone and his offseason at a baseball ranch in Woodlands, Texas, where he satiates his hunger for constant pitching feedback.

Bauer wants results. And he wants explanations for those results. He won't settle for reasoning that suggests he is simply having a lackluster day. There must be rationale for every misstep, every nuance, every detail in his life that doesn't unfold as his input would forecast.

"He thinks there's a reason for everything," said Tribe pitching coach Mickey Callaway.

When Yogi Berra once quipped that 90 percent of the game is half mental, he underestimated Bauer's mental capacity.

"My game is probably too much mental a lot of the time," Bauer said. "I've actually had to train myself to not think."

The unquenchable thirst for information is not an addiction, Bauer contends, because he can take time off if he so desired. He just prefers not to.

"I feel bad," Bauer said. "If I was going to take a night off, what am I going to do? If I do something or I want to relax, while I'm watching TV, I'm like, 'I feel like I'm not active. I'm not doing something. I should be reading something or thinking about something. Or while I'm watching TV, I should have a recovery unit on my arm.'"

Bauer doesn't have many friends outside of baseball. He never has, really. He has never had much interest in prioritizing his social skills. He'll shoot the breeze with others at the ranch, but those who spend their offseason at that site are wired the same way he is. Bauer calls it "a very select subset of a population," a group he meshes with because of the shared personality traits.

He clashed with colleagues in Arizona, his first major league stop. He was labeled as immature and ornery and stubborn and difficult. Those descriptions haven't stuck with him in Cleveland. Bauer has accepted the perspective Callaway offers. Manager Terry Francona has marveled at Bauer's competitive fire and has raved about how the hurler has blossomed this season.

Callaway will attribute a poor performance to a typical off day. They happen to everyone, he'll say. Bauer will counter by claiming there must be some readily attainable fix to prevent a similar showing in the future. The back-and-forth persists, but Bauer has grown to welcome both sides of the debate.

"If you dig deep enough, there's probably always a reason," Callaway said. "Is that reason always going to help you get over it? Or is it going to make things more complicated? That's the way I look at things a lot of the time. Sometimes it's better to say, 'OK, let's not concentrate on that too much, because it's not a huge issue and it's going to take care of itself.'"

Bauer appreciates the balance, though he refuses to submit to complacency. He spent all of last offseason redefining his delivery and mechanics. He'll spend this offseason finding new components to tweak.

Even in September, as his team claws its way through a playoff chase and he continues to emerge in his first full big league season, he can recite a laundry list of exercises he plans to employ over the winter to better his arsenal. He hopes the regimens will enhance his deceleration pattern and synchronize his velocity and command and perfect the axis on his slider and accomplish other goals masked by fancy terms that require easy access to Merriam-Webster. It's all part of his intricate plan.

"Everything I do is very methodical and thought-out and has a very specific purpose," Bauer said.

It's that way in all facets of his life, even dieting. He'll gorge on shrimp and sushi, but every meal or snack must contribute to the larger blueprint, the one he has already defined with targets and allowances and measured numbers and figures.

"I look at my body as an equation," Bauer said. "I want it to end up at some place, so X plus Y plus Z ends up there. I look at timing and nutrition and when I eat calories and protein and fats to try to optimize my training and my time."

Much of his baseball training is academic. He said he has "no love" for the physical component of the sport, which is reflective of his scrawny build.

"A lot of my athletic success is due to my ability to think and to process information," Bauer said.

Every time he tosses a pitch, he says, a flow of information and feedback will filter in to his brain, where he decides which nuggets to value and which to discard. Some influence the decision-making that fuels his next offering. He prides himself on commanding the aspects of pitching he has control over. He won't pout about serving up a broken-bat bloop single. His velocity, his pitch repertoire, his location, his competitive edge, his attention to detail -- those are the qualities that drive him to frustration when they don't function to the standard he expects.

Maybe he should learn to let go at times. He hasn't quite mastered that concept. That's just another process for him to explore.

"He's probably more advanced than any 23-year-old I've ever seen," Callaway said. "It's because of the way he thinks and goes about things. If he wasn't that type of person -- just look at him -- he wouldn't be who he is."