When COVID-19 shut down baseball, White Sox reliever Aaron Bummer traveled home to Omaha, Neb., where the lack of a complete shutdown allowed him to salvage a measure of normalcy.
A nearby Dick’s Sporting Goods was still open, and he bought a TRX set and an adjustable kettlebell to beef up his home gym. Two weeks ago, Bummer’s training facility in Omaha, Dynamic Velocity, re-opened on a limited basis to allow him to get more structured, socially distant workouts and throwing in, and recently the weather has been nice enough to throw outside.
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But even with all his effort to stay in the same throwing shape as when he left spring training in March, as representatives Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players’ Association talk to discuss resumption plans this week, the main question Bummer has is how it can be done safely.
“The safety part of it is priority No. 1,” Bummer said in an interview on The Athletic’s White Sox Business podcast. “It’s more juicy to talk about the money on Twitter. There’s more fire behind that. More people are going to talk about that. But at the end of the day, if it’s not safe, not only for the players, the players’ families, the coaches, the coaches’ families — you start adding up all the people that need to be safe to go back to work, then I think that probably is the largest issue, that safety comes first.”
Bummer and his family have stayed healthy throughout the crisis. But the Sox lefty pointed out that he throws at the same facility as A’s reliever Jake Diekman, who is immunocompromised due to ulcerative colitis. Generally, coaches and their families exist in higher risk brackets than top-flight athletes in their mid-20s to early-30s, but cannot be discounted at all in season resumption plans. Bummer is not Tony Clark, nor one of the White Sox team player reps, so he mostly defers to their expertise, but when he thinks about the resumption of play, his mind goes to the complications of avoiding the virus before contention about pay reductions.
“Every day that I stay off of Twitter and I stay out of the news, I’m absolutely optimistic,” Bummer said about resuming play. “And then you turn on the news and you hear about California shutting down for another three months.”
Now the proud owner of a five-year contract signed in spring training, Bummer’s future is a bit more secure than the average 26-year-old reliever. Since he entered 2019 spring training fighting for his place in the majors, he can appreciate how good his timing was to lock in his compensation (at least for the long term) before a season that could wreak havoc on players trying to fight for their spot or earn money in arbitration.
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“You can throw the baseball great for three months and then all of a sudden you have a bad week and that ruins your three months,” Bummer said. “So to think if you get off to a rocky start and you’re not ready to go when that season does start, that might affect arbitration numbers, that might affect options of getting guys up and down, so yeah, relievers this year are going to be even more volatile.”
Wading through that volatility is perilous, but it does happen, even for late-round picks who never made big waves on the prospect radar. Bummer, after all, was a 19th-rounder out of Nebraska as a college junior. He was disappointed enough about his slide in the draft that he strongly considered going back to school for his senior season and trying his luck the next year, even when he would lack leverage in negotiations. But in a 40-round draft, even though the White Sox did not call him until late, he was still able to negotiate a six-figure bonus more in line with his talent level and get his pro career started with decent financial support.
That wound up being well-timed, since even though his professional debut was successful in 2014 after being drafted that June, Bummer was pitching through elbow pain and would have Tommy John surgery the next year. He eventually matured into a premier reliever with a 2.13 ERA in 67 2/3 innings last season but could imagine his path playing out much differently if he went unselected in the five-round draft that amateurs face this season.
“It sucks because if it was me, in my position, I would have gone back to school,” Bummer said. “I would have gone back to school for my senior year. Potentially, if we can play it all out, I had Tommy John and would have had surgery my senior year of college and then I would have been a redshirt senior and who knows if I would ever be playing again. I think it stinks for a lot of guys, but at the same time, there’s still opportunity out there and that all that it takes.”
With five rounds, there will be a large crop of players available as undrafted free agents, and Bummer expects they’ll be drawn to teams that can boast the most appealing player development plans. That might be an interesting landscape for talent distribution, where teams will have to recruit and keep up in player development to access the best talent. But the $20,000 cap for bonuses complicates it, and would drive a lot of players back to school, hoping the 2021 draft will return some normalcy and more financial security.
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Normalcy, or something like it, is what everyone in baseball is striving for at this point. Even the proposed dates for spring training give Bummer a target date to train for since he is used to preparing his body with specific timelines and goals in mind. Even with a potentially tense negotiation with the league and union getting started, the prevailing feeling is this will get done in some way.
“Personally, I want to go back to work,” Bummer said. “I’m very optimistic and I’m very hopeful. Do I think that it’s 100 percent a given? Not necessarily, but I’m very very optimistic.”
(Photo: Ron Vesely / MLB Photos via Getty Images)