It was a quarter past 3 on a Tuesday afternoon in April when Jake Bruml ’15 took a seat among parents, siblings and friends in the metal bleachers behind home plate at Los Alamitos High School.
As director of amateur scouting for the Boston Red Sox, the Pomona College alumnus is nomadic most of the year, his weekday afternoons an endless parade of high school and collegiate baseball at different schools in different counties in different states.
It’s a gig that’s taken him to baseball hotbeds in California and Florida as often as it’s taken him to towns in Alabama and Oklahoma that have one stoplight and a can’t-miss prospect everyone there knows by name.
For a few days this spring, Bruml returned to Southern California, where he collected 203 hits and 23 pitching wins as a Sagehen.
“Pomona College is an incredible place,” he says. “I loved my time there and made connections that’ll last a lifetime.”
Since hiring the San Mateo, California, native as a pro scouting intern ahead of the 2019 season, Red Sox brass has placed a premium on Bruml’s work ethic and eye for talent. As a result, one of Pomona’s own is a key decision-maker within one of Major League Baseball’s most storied franchises.
Bruml, whom the Boston Herald profiled in May, will be in the catbird seat when the 2026 MLB Draft begins Saturday, July 11—an unfathomable career outcome for a 32-year-old with a degree in chemistry.
“Pomona challenged me in a way I’ve never been challenged before,” he says. “Between balancing the rigorous courseload and lab work that being a STEM major included, in addition to being an athlete, I really had to navigate things strategically.”
“I didn’t know it at the time, but that set me up for future success in any role.”
‘Why Couldn’t That Be Me?’
Bruml finished his four years in Sagehen blue with a .344 batting average, 58 doubles and 15 home runs. On the mound, he threw 274 innings and racked up 169 strikeouts.
His 23 career wins as a pitcher still rank fourth in program history.
A three-time conference all-academic team honoree, Bruml took his chemistry degree and joined a startup biotech company doing cancer research in Berkeley.
“I followed a path I thought made sense,” he says. “Chemistry degree into a chemistry job.”
After three years in the lab, Bruml was eager for more.
“I wanted to continue to be challenged but also knew I didn’t want to be in the lab mixing chemicals for the rest of my life,” he says. “So I took time to reevaluate what it was I wanted to do.”
As much as he loved science, Bruml realized that assuming any type of management role within a company required an advanced degree, and frankly, he didn’t love chemistry enough to pursue a master’s or Ph.D. in the field.
He eventually took the GMAT and plotted a course in business.
Still indecisive on his future, Bruml had a heart-to-heart talk with his father, who challenged him to make his greatest passion—baseball—his career. “If you’re going to shuffle your life anyways,” Bruml recalls his dad advising, “why not go for the thing in this entire world that makes you the happiest?”
In 2018, Bruml connected with former Pomona teammates Guy Stevens ’13 and Simon Rosenbaum ’16, who by then had carved out front office roles with the Kansas City Royals and Tampa Bay Rays, respectively.
After picking their brains about how to break into the industry, Bruml had the blueprint.
“They were having successful careers in baseball,” he says, “and I thought, ‘Why couldn’t that be me?’”
Grunt Work
Bruml took an internship with the Red Sox shortly after the franchise won the 2018 World Series. Besides an aunt, uncle and cousin who lived in the suburbs, the native Californian knew not a soul in Boston.
Bruml did traditional grunt work as a 25-year-old intern. He restocked fridges, shuttled players to and from surgery, and taxied them to Fenway Park from the airport. He rarely clocked out at 5 p.m.
“A large part of the internship was testing our perseverance, seeing if we were cut out to work in baseball,” he says. “It was hard and sometimes annoying work, but at the same time, I was fully immersed in the front office.”
As an apprentice, Bruml supported the Red Sox’s pro scouting department by connecting with scouts in the field, reading talent evaluations, writing scouting reports of his own and tracking information for the scouting director.
His first MLB Draft exposure came as a fly on the wall in the Red Sox’s decision room, listening to front office executives discuss top targets with the organization’s top scouts, creating draft magnets with prospects’ names to line up whiteboards around the room, and subsequently discarding those magnets as prospects were being drafted by other teams.
On game days during the 2019 season, Bruml alternated between being a go-fer for then-Red Sox GM Dave Dombrowski, operating a motion-capture system the organization uses to track a pitcher’s mechanics, and handling the radar gun for the Fenway scoreboard.
“They threw the interns into the deep end to see which of us could swim,” he says.
Rapid Rise in Beantown
The Red Sox hired Bruml full time prior to the 2020 season, three months before the pandemic postponed Opening Day. When America’s pastime returned that July, his role in amateur scouting included “making sure everything was running smoothly,” he says.
“Whatever task was needed or thrown on my plate, I took it on to keep us moving forward without any hiccups.”
Good work the past six seasons has earned Bruml promotions to increasingly important scouting roles, including the director of amateur scouting post he assumed in October.
As the Pomona alumnus applies his scouting philosophy to a 126-year-old franchise with nine World Series titles, he’s using principles he picked up at Pomona to weigh million-dollar decisions near the top of the MLB Draft. (The Red Sox have the 20th pick in the first round Saturday, a slot valued at $4.4 million.)
In the lab—at Pomona and in Berkeley—Bruml followed procedures to create compounds or complete experiments. Depending on the results, he would determine how to improve either the procedure or the compound itself to generate a better outcome.
“I’ve been able to create a similar process that can be applied to evaluating prospects, where every player is held to the same evaluation process and scrutiny,” he says. “This allows me to home in on the questions that need answering when watching them play.”
“Questions like, how good are a hitter’s contact skills?” he adds. “Or, is a pitcher more likely to be a starter or a reliever?”
Shaped largely at Pomona, Bruml’s holistic approach to scouting and drafting is what Red Sox brass, coaches and fans hope brings Beantown its next great homegrown star.