Rule 5 draftee Cooper Bowman returned to A’s by Cincinnati Reds

Does Cincinnati’s Opening Day roster now look set?

Selecting players in the Rule 5 Draft is almost always a complete dice roll. Sure, there are always ample reasons why players are selected, but the hoops they have to jump through to stick with their new organizations paired with the reasons why their previous organizations hadn’t protected them from said draft in the first place more often than not make it tough for the moves to stick.

Such is now officially the case with Cooper Bowman and the Cincinnati Reds, who selected the versatile defender off the Sacramento/Oakland/Las Vegas A’s roster over the winter. Bowman was officially returned to the A’s organization today, as MLB.com’s Mark Sheldon relayed on Bluesky.

Rule 5ers have to either stick on the drafting team’s active roster all year or be offered back to their original team, so this isn’t merely a case of why didn’t the Reds just option Bowman to AAA. Bowman, for what it’s worth, only has a grand total of 152 PA at the AAA level so far in his big league career, and he posted just a .592 OPS for AAA Las Vegas in that time as a 24 year old.

Cactus League stats don’t really mean anything at all, but the Reds did at least give Bowman ample chance to surprise them. The 25 AB he had logged so far this spring was tied for the second most among all players in Reds camp, though he went just 3 for 25 (all singles) in that time.

There was a train of thought that Spencer Steer’s balky shoulder might give Bowman a larger chance at making the Opening Day roster, but it appears that the versatility shown by Gavin Lux so far around the infield and in LF may well have placated the team’s desires to backfill in Steer’s likely absence to begin the year.