What to expect from Aaron Bummer in 2022 originally appeared on NBC Sports Chicago
Rick Hahn will be among the first to tell you that there's an awful lot of volatility in relief pitching from one year to the next.
Hahn, though, is the same guy who gave a long-term contract to Aaron Bummer before the 2020 season, the Chicago White Sox believing they had a reliever on their hands who would be pretty darn consistent from one year to the next.
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Bummer and the White Sox' bullpen had high expectations coming into 2021, the lefty among those talking up the unit as potentially one of baseball's best.
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"I don't expect to lose a game if we're leading after the fifth inning," he said during spring training. "I really think that the talent in our bullpen is that good, to where we should be able to go out there and hold leads for our starters, regardless of the score.
"At the end of the day, I don't necessarily care if we end up the No. 1 rated bullpen or the No. 4 rated bullpen or No. 7. I want to be 90-0 with a lead after six innings."
But there was a swift reality check in exactly the kind of volatility Hahn has brought up in the past, much of the relief corps' biggest arms stumbling, to some degree, during the first half of last year. Even All-Star closer Liam Hendriks, who by season's end was as dominant as ever, winning his second straight American League Reliever of the Year Award, had his own issues in the early going.
Bummer was not immune and arguably was the team's poster child for the difference between those high preseason hopes and what played out in the first half, experiencing the sort of bad luck and inopportune problems that had fans scratching their heads, wondering where the Bummer they knew — a 2.13 ERA in 2019 and a 0.96 ERA in 2020 — had gone.
With time spent working with pitching coach Ethan Katz, the left-hander ironed most of those issues out, and though consistency remained an issue during the second half, too, he was the dominant setup force everyone had gotten used to by September, with a 0.75 ERA in 14 appearances during the regular season's final month. His late-season righting of the ship allowed the White Sox to have a dynamite setup man to turn to, even while deadline acquisition Craig Kimbrel struggled in what was a new role for him.
The good news there is that Bummer showed he is still quite capable of being the guy the White Sox thought he'd be when they gave him the contract extension that'll keep him on the South Side through the 2026 season.
What's not so great, though, is that the ups and downs Bummer went through in 2021 make it rather difficult to project what's to come in 2022.
The ability is not in question. He's still a remarkably talented left-handed reliever whose sinker has been described as one of baseball's best pitches.
"I've caught a lot of baseballs with guys that throw really hard," Katz said in the spring, "and that was by far, one of his sinkers he threw me, was the hardest pitch I have ever had to try and catch in my life. Had it not been off to the side he would have squared me up and hit me. I was just trying to knock it down. It was the most impressive thing I've ever seen in my life."
"It's a top-five best pitch in the game," Evan Marshall said in the spring, "the Aaron Bummer sinker."
That means a lot of ground balls and a lot of strikeouts. But as we saw in 2021, the ground balls don't always go where they're supposed to. What kind of luck comes in 2022? Well, if that was knowable, we'd all be out in Vegas.
Bummer will be one of Tony La Russa's most called upon setup options, that we can figure out already. The White Sox lost late-inning arms Ryan Tepera and Marshall, they moved Michael Kopech to the rotation, and they're talking openly about trading away Kimbrel, despite picking up his option.
Kendall Graveman is aboard, presumably, to fill the role Kimbrel was supposed to, but we can basically forecast Bummer and Graveman as a two-headed setup monster in front of Hendriks. That'll mean continued high leverage spots for Bummer, the importance of his outings leading to some of the frustration fans had with him as his luck changed in 2021.
"S--t happens," Bummer said at one point last summer, an accurate if not pleasing summation of some of the stuff he went through last year. Luck is as volatile as relief pitching, but the White Sox believe that Bummer is someone who can rise above that volatility. He certainly has the talent to do it. Time to find out if the Bummer-Graveman-Hendriks gang can deliver on the hype that the White Sox bullpen, as a whole, couldn't consistently live up to in 2021.
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