From baseball to chemistry, and back again

Jake Bruml has wanted to be a professional baseball player for as long as he can remember. There are pictures of him at two years old with a bat and ball, and videos of him playing on a tee-ball team around age three.

‘I tried to hold on to the dream of being a professional baseball player as long as possible but also recognised that I was not much more than a Division III athlete,’ he says. ‘The odds were absolutely stacked against me.’

Bruml played baseball at Pomona College in California, US, and at the end of his freshman year in 2012 had to decide on a major. With science being his other lifelong love, it came down to either biology or chemistry. He chose the latter.

After junior year, and with no opportunity to play baseball in a collegiate summer league, Bruml accepted an internship in the chemistry department of Aduro Biotech, a startup biopharmaceutical company based in Berkeley, California.

Aduro had a compound that was in early-stage clinical trials for melanoma at the time, dubbed S100. ‘I was mostly focused on process chemistry, trying different ways of creating the compound to see if we could become more effective and increase our yield or cut down our reaction times,’ he explains. Bruml’s research that summer became the basis of his senior thesis at Pomona.

Towards the end of his senior year, in April 2015, Aduro went public. Bruml had stayed in touch with leaders at the company and managed to secure and accept a full-time job offer there as a research assistant just before the stock launch.

His job entailed synthesising novel cancer therapeutics, conducting laboratory inventory management, doing data analysis relating biological data to chemical structure, and managing the very intern programme he had participated in.

A ‘light bulb moment’

Bruml continued playing baseball, coordinating an adult co-ed slow pitch softball league with his Aduro coworkers, and joining an adult fastpitch baseball league featuring former college players.

But after working at Aduro about a year-and-a-half, Bruml realised he wanted to be a leader and wasn’t sure he could achieve that there. The logical next step appeared to be pursuing a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree and then seeking a senior role at a biotechnology company.

He then had a lifechanging conversation in which his father suggested an MBA is a very expensive endeavour that might not provide much more clarity for the future. ‘He floated the idea that I have always been passionate about baseball and maybe I could make that my career somehow,’ Bruml recalls. He calls it ‘a light bulb moment.’

At the time, a couple of friends Bruml had played baseball with at Pomona were working in the front offices of professional baseball teams. He reached out to them and was advised to attend the Major League Baseball (MLB) Winter Meetings in Las Vegas, Nevada in December 2018 – an annual gathering of representatives from all 30 MLB teams and their minor league affiliates.

Bruml booked the trip. After a handful of onsite interviews with various teams, he got an internship offer from the Red Sox to support the team’s professional scouting department and general operations.

Things went well, and after a year Bruml was offered a full-time position with the Red Sox as an assistant supporting the professional scouting and amateur scouting departments. Pro scouting focuses on players who have signed contracts with a team in the MLB or minor leagues, as well as some international players. Amateur scouting, by contrast, targets draft-eligible players in high school or in college who have not yet signed with a team.

Next, Bruml transitioned to the amateur scouting department full-time and spent 2021 as an assistant there. ‘If amateur scouting is an engine, then I was the oil – making sure everything was lubricated and operating as intended,’ he explains. After performing well once again, Bruml was promoted to coordinator of amateur scouting in 2021. Not only did he have more scouting responsibilities but also helped oversee the intern programme.

Chemistry skills applied to baseball

Bruml was promoted to assistant director of amateur scouting at the end of 2023 and then to director of amateur scouting in October 2025. He now oversees 28 staff members.

Bruml says his chemistry training has prepared him for the demands of professional sports scouting in several ways. ‘As an intern at Aduro I made sure that everything had equal attention to detail, including tasks that were not my favourite, and that is a very transferable skill,’ he says.

The multitasking aspect of working in a chemistry lab has also been useful. ‘At times I was running five, six maybe even up to 10 experiments at a given time and I was keeping all of those reactions in order,’ Bruml says. Now he needs those skills to keep track of his staff, who are scattered throughout the country, as well as players of interest. ‘We have approximately 800 different players on our Draft Board, so it is complicated to keep track of them, how they are performing and how they are being valued,’ Bruml states.

His science background has also helped by making him extremely process oriented. ‘In baseball, which is a game rooted in failure, we are at the mercy of the results, but we also cannot let the results drive too much of the decision making,’ he notes. ‘Remaining process oriented is one of the lab skills that has been the most transferable to baseball.’

Bruml wants to stay in baseball for as long as he can but enjoys knowing that he has that chemistry degree in his back pocket if needed.