PHOENIX — Before White Sox reliever Aaron Bummer got $16 million guaranteed in a five-year extension that could keep him in Chicago through 2026, he got an education.
Bummer’s agent Tom O’Connell started the process by showing him a book with an array of comparable relievers and what they had earned in salary arbitration, a process Bummer would be reliant on down the road had he not signed his deal. After starting last season merely trying to stick in the majors, Bummer had not spent much time considering how his salary would progress through arbitration.
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He quickly saw a fraught path for non-closer relievers, even ones who performed at the elite level he reached in 2019.
“I hope that part of the arbitration process changes because it was something where I didn’t really have an idea,” Bummer said. “Josh Hader was probably the most valuable reliever over the last two and a half years, yet because he didn’t have as many saves as somebody else in the two years prior, he didn’t get paid as much. But the reality is that his value to a club is significantly higher.”
With his injury history and the systemic cap on his earning potential, taking a guaranteed sum was all the more appealing. But it also puts Bummer in a position to be a better teammate. He’s been extremely valuable for his ability to cover multiple innings and be dropped into any situation. Yet if he were relying on an arbiter to determine his value, he’d have plenty of incentive to push to get out of that role sooner than later.
“Any time you’re pitching not in the ninth inning, you might be upset because that’s dollars and cents you could be making,” Bummer said. “With this contract and the stability, it doesn’t matter. I can go out there and pitch whatever inning and it doesn’t affect my career. I do think that a lot of guys, once they realize that saves get you paid, they’ll want saves.”
Bummer’s recommendations for changes to the process are mostly incremental. Holds don’t have the same value as saves in arbitration, but they’re recognized, and he thinks rewarding one per inning would benefit the unique talent of multi-inning guys. And for multi-inning saves from pitchers like Alex Colomé, whom Bummer no longer has financial incentive to usurp, he thinks granting them a hold and a save would be fairer. But with how bullpen usage has evolved, maybe a more radical effort to value players who dominate in high-leverage situations is due.
“There is a shift that’s going away from the traditional closer,” Bummer said.
Thanks to his stellar minor league track record, most projection systems actually call for Dylan Cease to improve a bit on his 5.79 ERA from 2019. But in his short time as a major leaguer, he’s struggled, and as a result, most statistical projections still think he will continue to struggle. This is how projections work.
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Here in reality, the 24-year-old Cease is oozing with raw talent and stuff, and tapping into his front-end starter upside is one of the easiest ways for the White Sox to contend for a playoff spot now. So Cease having a big spring means a bit more than it would for Dallas Keuchel. And Cease, having allowed a single solo home run, with eight strikeouts and no walks in six innings, at least superficially is having a big spring so far. Maybe it goes beyond superficial.
“The best way I can put it is that’s the best I’ve ever seen him,” catcher James McCann said.
“This is as confident as I’ve ever been on the mound,” Cease said.
If Cease’s rookie season were encumbered by a concrete issue of unintentional fastball cut that hindered any sort of consistent command, Cease’s first two starts this spring have a concrete source of encouragement beyond good results against watered-down lineups. He believes he has proof that his efforts to eliminate the rotational movement in his front side during his delivery have opened up new quadrants of the strike zone for him.
“He went fastball to glove side and it was either edge or it was off, fastball arm side it was either edge or it was off,” McCann said of Cease’s last outing. “There weren’t noncompetitive misses with any pitch all day long.”
“I don’t feel like I commanded it at all last year,” Cease said of fastballs low and away. “I might have had spurts but if you go back and watch it, I had four straight innings of dotting, dotting low and away. I didn’t have it any point last year.”
The lack of consistency and effectiveness obscures it, but Cease can appear very much in the mold of Lucas Giolito, riding his four-seamer high in the zone and pitching off that location with his trademark curveball. Throwing his heater low and away doesn’t give Cease the same optical illusion effect of his vertical ride that induces hitters to swing under it — if they’re not just outright late — but it serves at least three purposes.
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First, while Cease can throw his spike curve on a high plane, the low-and-away heater works best combined with his slider, which already dives low and away from right-handed hitters. Second, it expands the hitters’ conception of quadrants where Cease can command, getting them off his bread-and-butter up in the zone. As a starter, he can only really hope to overpower hitters up top once through the order without showing another element they have to guard against. Finally, it may not be where the vertical movement plays best, but low and away is an area few right-handers can cover with any meaningful authority, especially if Cease is able to pitch inside as well.
“In the day and age we’re in, everyone wants to talk about ride on their fastballs and the carry and the spin rate and everything,” McCann said. “At the end of the day, if you’re locating 99 mph — obviously ride is going to make it better — but 99 mph is going to be hard to hit, especially when you mix in the stuff that he has. If he’s able to locate like that consistently, he’s going to be a special player.”
Cease becoming special is one of the most straightforward routes to the 2020 White Sox having a special season.
White Sox relief prospect Tyler Johnson is 24 years old and was a pretty good high school basketball player growing up in suburban Richmond, Va. But if Johnson — who has struck out 35.8 percent of opposing batters in his minor league career — is posting a video of himself on Instagram touching 98 mph, the caption is more likely to be a quote from Muhammad Ali than Kobe Bryant.
“That man is my idol,” the hard-throwing right-hander said.
Becoming obsessed with a guy who retired from boxing before he was born took some doing. Johnson went through old videos, scoured YouTube for any clips of Ali’s fights that he could find. And when he was a teenager, Johnson had plenty of time.
His high school basketball days were stunted by a pair of injuries in his left knee that required microfracture surgery, and while he was laid up and trying to summon the strength to grit through rehab, Johnson found a model to follow. Ali being imprisoned for his beliefs and bearing the brunt of anti-black racism in the 1960s made Johnson’s goals seem very achievable by comparison.
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Last April, Johnson was still stuck in Arizona rather than pitching with an affiliate, rehabbing a lat strain. It should have been the most frustrating point of his professional career, and in many ways it was. But that month brightened at least a little bit when “What’s My Name: Muhammad Ali” debuted on HBO, offering him a new documentary to tear through.
“That was like, the best day of my life,” Johnson said with a laugh.
Perhaps he was born in the wrong era, since Johnson’s other big love is the music of Sam Cooke (“He and Ali were good friends!”), though he admits that his playlist goes pretty heavy on rap and more current stuff when he’s trying to motivate himself through a weightlifting session. Also, free of any pain or injury, Johnson believes this is the best he’s been physically in three spring trainings as a professional, making a fast rise from Double A to a big-league bullpen look achievable this season.
“Stuff wise, I feel like I’ve taken some big strides doing what I want to do with off-speed stuff, as well as command,” Johnson said.
With a $55.5 million contract, no one wants to see Dallas Keuchel getting roughed up for four runs on eight hits before the end of the fourth inning in spring training, least of all the man himself. But there’s some spring training context to his effort level.
“I’m not trying to jam down the accelerator,” Keuchel said. “I have to unintentionally back off a little bit and make sure that when we leave spring training I’m not 110 percent, I’m still hovering at like 85 (percent) because there was a lack of spring training last year. I’m not trying to get tired in late August and September like a lot of the young guys do when they’re coming into camp and going full bore and trying to make a team.”
Keuchel attributed his rough day Saturday against a largely maligned Giants offense to a point where he “lost focus” in a spring training game that didn’t mean much beyond his physical ramp-up; an approach where he was just filling up and around the strike zone rather than pinpointing like he had to, and being more worried about breaking ball shape than batted ball results.
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It’s spring. Everyone would like a new leadership figure to step in and assert himself, but it would feel pretty stupid to over-exert in March and struggle in August.
“I just want to be broad around the strike zone,” Keuchel said. “That way I can start to feel and pick and choose locations of what I want to do. Some of them were meant to be up. There are some four-seams I’ve been trying to throw up and in to righties especially it’s a good avenue for me. There were a few that kind of stayed on a truer line then took a left or right turn at the last second. That’s really what I’m intending to do is broaden the strike zone and then get a feel, last couple of starts.”
Was that a slider or a curveball that Reynaldo López used to strike out Manny Machado in the first of 4 1/3 innings of walkless, scoreless ball in Peoria on Sunday?
Chatting in English, López explained he has two sliders: a slower, straighter version that he was using to grab strikes early in the count. But what he used on Machado was a harder version, with a late burst of lateral sweep.
“It really was (Yasmani) Grandal’s credit,” López said through team interpreter Billy Russo. “The first time he caught a bullpen of mine, he realized I have two different sliders, two different speeds for sliders. He basically developed the plan, let’s try to go ahead with the slower one and then we can show the faster one and we can try to mix it up and play with the heaters. That’s what we tried to do today and I think it went well.”
Grandal, who tested out his healing calf with another double, didn’t really want to discuss the two sliders too much. But it’s almost as if he didn’t want to limit the discussion to just the two sliders.
“He’s throwing eight pitches for strikes,” Grandal said.
Eight pitches?
“He’s got fastball, two-seam, slider, cutter, curveball, split, changeup,” Grandal said. “Close to it.”
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While the best moments of López’s 2019 were when his fastball was so overpowering that command of his off-speed pitches didn’t matter, Sunday featured López getting ahead with his off-speed, and finishing off hitters with it as well for five strikeouts. After making a mechanical adjustment from his first outing to stay more in his back leg and not get too quick in his delivery, López was able to command all of it — four pitches, seven pitches, whatever — and looked like a more versatile pitcher with a lot more margin for error. It made the fact that he sat around 93-95 mph on the stadium gun, one of his slower days, irrelevant.
“We relied on the fastball when we needed it,” Grandal said. “We just kind of introduced different looks in order to get away with a missed fastball over the plate, and he just kept working. Hopefully we just build off of it. Hopefully he feels pretty good about it.”
(Photo of Dylan Cease: Ralph Freso / Getty Images)