Dylan Bundy grabbed his phone, scrolled through his contacts and found it.
“Mom.”
He stared at the number for a moment.
It was the summer of 2014, and Bundy was in Aberdeen, Md., on the rocky road back to the big leagues.
The muscular right-hander, then 21, already had a lifetime of achievements on his resume. As a high school senior, he was named Gatorade’s Athlete of the Year, the first baseball player to achieve that honor. Bundy was selected fourth overall by the Orioles in the 2011 amateur draft and signed a contract worth $6.2 million. Fifteen months later, he was standing on the Fenway Park mound for his MLB debut at age 19.
Advertisement
The world was Dylan Bundy’s. Then it crashed. And exploded into pieces.
Right elbow discomfort in 2013 led to ligament-reconstruction surgery, putting Bundy’s can’t-miss career in jeopardy. His big brother, Bobby, also an aspiring Orioles’ pitching prospect, underwent the Tommy John procedure 10 weeks later.
Nothing, though, could have braced the brothers for what happened in December 2013 – with life’s cruelest curveball rocking the tight-knit family from Sperry, Oklahoma.
Months later, Bundy had tossed a shutout for the Short A Aberdeen IronBirds as part of his injury rehab. His blessed right arm was back, his pitches sharp, his velocity climbing.
He wanted to tell someone. He wanted to tell her.
So Bundy found the number in his contacts. And called it.
“I knew her phone wouldn’t ring,” he said. “But I still wanted to do it anyway.”
(Photo of Dylan, Denver, Lori and Bobby Bundy courtesy of the Bundy family)Cancer is indiscriminate. It doesn’t care who you are, how you’ve led your life, what’s at stake in the future. It will take the elderly; it will take children.
And it will take a 54-year-old doting mother of two. A loving wife. A skilled tradesperson with a certification in plumbing and pipefitting. A sweet, quiet, seemingly healthy woman who played catch with her sons, mowed her property’s expansive pasture and volunteered in the community.
“She was quite a lady,” Denver Bundy said of his late wife, Lori. “I mean, she could put on a dress one day and the next day she had her overalls on.”
Lori Bundy grew up in Oklahoma playing softball and basketball. She was a bodybuilder when she first met her future husband, who at that time ran a gym. They worked together at the Ford Motor Company’s auto glass plant in Tulsa. They knew how to fix things, knew how to get things done.
“It was so very seldom that that girl ever got sick at all,” Denver Bundy said. “I’ve been the bad boy all my life, I’m the one that’s gonna die first. It was commonly known that she was gonna be around to take such good care of me. That’s kind of the irony in all of this.”
Advertisement
In July 2013, Lori Bundy coughed up blood. At the hospital, she was told she had a severe infection, given some medication and sent home. In October, it happened again, and this time the couple knew something was wrong. She visited an oncologist, who surmised she was likely dealing with a cancerous tumor but needed more information. A biopsy was scheduled.
The Bundys decided to keep that news private. No need to worry anyone, especially if it turned out to be treatable. They took the same approach with their sons. They told them Mom was going for some tests. But no need to be overly concerned yet.
The family had Thanksgiving in Oklahoma at Dylan Bundy’s home, which is on the property adjacent to his parents’ place. He flew back from Florida, where he had been rehabbing, for the typical holiday gathering. Everyone, including Lori, pitched in with the meal. Nothing out of the ordinary.
“Basically, that was the last time I really saw my mom,” Bundy said.
In a vacuum, Dylan Bundy is simply another middling pitcher in the majors.
Sure, he was the Orioles’ Opening Day starter in 2018 after a solid campaign (13-9, 4.24 ERA) in 2017. But this year he is 7-14 with a 5.58 ERA for the worst team in baseball. His fastball that touched triple digits in high school and early in his pro career sits in the low-90s.
He hasn’t been able to consistently command his pitches, leading to an uneven 2018 that included two months with ERAs under 3.00 and three months and counting with ERAs over 6.00.
After spraining his left ankle running the bases in late June, Bundy’s season has unraveled. He leads the majors — and has set a modern Orioles’ franchise record — with 37 home runs allowed. After each rough start there’s speculation that he’ll be shut down for the remainder of the year.
Bundy was arguably the best high school pitcher ever. So disappointment abounds – for Bundy, for the Orioles, for their fans – that he currently looks like another guy in the rotation and not an unquestioned ace.
Advertisement
But he’s only 25. And it’s not recommended to doubt him.
“I think when you’ve had so many things that maybe you thought were gonna be there forever get taken away from you, it makes you really realize the things that are really important in life,” Orioles manager Buck Showalter said. “There’s nobody that competes like Dylan. And that’s really helped him turn the page on the good and the bad.”
Bundy has never used excuses for his poor performances. He’s not equating difficulties five years ago with what’s happening now. Each situation is its own challenge.
Yet there’s no question what he endured in 2013 has made him the man he is today, has given him the perspective to keep pushing.
“If you struggle up here, well, it’s said (previous adversity) might make it easier, and that’s not really the case,” Bundy said. “But you realize that there are other things in life other than just baseball. Like going through Tommy John and losing your mom. That makes Tommy John seem like nothing afterwards, because losing your mom is probably one of the hardest things you’re ever gonna go through.”
(Photo courtesy of the Bundy family)Given Bundy’s singular focus on baseball, it’s not surprising his most cherished times with his mother were with a glove in her hand. And, occasionally, with her hobbling after a baseball.
“Just playing catch with her, playing long toss. Like having me throw a ball 250 feet and hit her on the foot, but she’d still run and go get it, even though it hurt,” Bundy said. “Huge baseball fan. Huge. Dad would be gone on a hunting trip or something, and I’d be like 14 or 15 years old and I’d have to play long toss. Well, Mom would get a glove and say, ‘Let’s go. You’ve got work to do.’”
Lori Bundy threw batting practice to her sons, too. She’d be at every game — sometimes off to the side, watching quietly, but always there.
Advertisement
“She didn’t talk a lot, but she lived in a house with a bunch of men that were louder,” said April Bowman, a longtime family friend of the Bundys. “She was quiet, kind of reserved, but very much the baseball mom that always showed up for everything and had on her boys’ jerseys.”
That’s when she wasn’t working at the auto plant or working at Home Depot or repairing things around the house.
“If there was a problem with the toilet, she’d fix it, not Dad,” Bundy said. “Yeah, she’d be working on cars, too. She could fix any electrical problem we had in the house.”
Lori Bundy also was the ultimate protector – especially when it came to her teenaged sons and their dealings with her well-meaning-but-intense husband.
“When we were in Little League, if I went 0-for-3 with three strikeouts and Dad was gone, I’d try to get her to tell my dad that I went 1-for-3 with a soft grounder through the hole, just so Dad wouldn’t get so mad at me,” Bundy said. “And she’d do it, she’d stick up for me. She always had your back.”
Denver Bundy is an unapologetic baseball dad and coach, legendary for his unique training techniques and iron will. Parents still send their boys to him for baseball lessons with the proviso, “Treat them like you treated your sons.”
If the Bundy boys, while playing catch, soared a ball above their partner’s head, they’d have to run the perimeter of their 15-acre property before they could throw again.
Denver Bundy had his sons dig holes in the backyard, load the dirt into a wheelbarrow, maneuver the wheelbarrow around the 15 acres and then put the dirt back in the holes.
“A lot of those stories are true. A lot of them, they exaggerated a few things a little bit,” Denver Bundy said, laughing. “But a lot of them are true. I did have them dig holes. And this wasn’t for punishment; this was their workout.”
Advertisement
The stop sign about a mile or so from their house was a beacon of achievement — and pain. Do something wrong, run to the stop sign and back. Do something right, and the Bundy boys were still probably running to that stop sign, often with stopwatches in their hands. Sometimes in full football pads.
The few neighbors they had would snicker as the Bundy boys sprinted past. And they had to be sprinting — or running hard, anyway. If their father saw them dogging it through his binoculars, he’d fire up his four-wheeler, chase them down, and there’d be hell to pay in the currency of more running, more sweat.
The Bundy boys flipped tractor tires before it was the rage. They ran with sandbags and curled with steel-pipe sawhorses. At age 12, young Dylan cut down a tree by himself. His dad was OK with his pre-teen swinging the axe unsupervised; the problem was the boy cut down the property’s only persimmon tree, which provided food to the deer that roamed their land.
He should have targeted one of the hundred pecan trees in their woods. Like the one teenaged Bobby, under the watchful eye of his father, had to attempt to tackle in full pads and helmet in the searing summer heat.
“I’m lined up in a three-point stance against this pecan tree. And he says, ‘OK, now I want you to hit the pecan tree.’ And I’m like, ‘Hit it? Like, hit it, hit it?’ And he’s like, ‘Don’t question me. Hit it.’ I’m like, ‘Whoa. OK, I’ll do what Dad says.’ And I hit it. And it wasn’t hard enough. And he’s telling me to hit it harder. He says, ‘No one in this league is gonna hit harder than this pecan tree.’ And I’m thinking, ‘No duh. This thing is like 90 feet tall.’”
Yes, Denver Bundy was relentless at times. But his boys will tell you there are no regrets.
“He did it all the right way, he did everything out of the kindness of his heart,” Dylan Bundy says. “To make a better life for us. He didn’t want us being a mechanic and working with our hands and having arthritis by the age of 40, like his hands are. And I can’t thank him enough now for doing that. Now I wish, honestly, that he could have pushed me a little bit harder.”
Advertisement
Really? Pushed harder?
“Ahhh, no. Not really,” Bundy says with a wry smile. “I think he did a good job of pushing us.”
The Bundy boys can tell some crazy stories about their childhoods.
Like the bathtub story. Wait until you get to the bathtub story.
An Orioles’ eighth-round pick in 2008, Bobby Bundy initially was in Florida in 2013 rehabbing with his brother. But he eventually went back to Oklahoma to work with therapists there.
He met his parents at the hospital when his mom experienced the second bleeding episode. He attended her next doctor’s appointment and knew there potentially was a cancerous mass around her lungs. And he planned to go with his parents to the biopsy, but his mother discouraged that.
“Mom called me and she said, ‘Bobby, don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about coming in, it’s only like a 30-minute deal. We should be in and out of there. I’m feeling good about it. Me and your dad are gonna go on a date afterwards,” Bobby Bundy remembered. “And then she said something about going Christmas shopping.”
A few hours later, his father called.
“He said, ‘You need to get to the hospital, things aren’t looking good,’” Bobby Bundy recalled. “When I called Dylan, it was later that evening, and he made it in the nick of time.”
The biopsy revealed the worst-case scenario. The main artery to Lori Bundy’s lungs was encased in aggressive, Stage 4, small-cell cancer. She began internally bleeding during the procedure, and doctors couldn’t stop it.
Dylan was in Sarasota, rehabbing in the mornings and having the afternoons and evenings to fish or hang out on the beach or do whatever. He had been golfing when he received the call from his brother. It floored him.
“I got in a car, went straight to the airport and went right home,” he said. “It happened so quick, and it shows that you can’t take life for granted and people can be gone in a heartbeat.”
Advertisement
The three men gathered at the hospital, an unexpected vigil for the most important woman in their lives, the glue of their family who suddenly was on a ventilator. Their options were limited.
“(The doctor) sat me and the boys down and said we’re not doing her any good. They saw she was full of blood and said, ‘Let nature take its course,’” Denver Bundy recalled. “I talked to the boys about it and we all agreed, without hesitation (to remove the ventilator). It was just about as quick as I’m telling you right now. That’s about as quick as it happened.”
December 2013 is a blur.
Bundy stayed in Oklahoma through the month. His mom’s birthday was 10 days after her death. That was gut-wrenching. She had always made a big deal out of birthdays, always sending cards, never forgetting anyone’s.
Ten days later came Christmas, and an emptiness that can’t be duplicated. Bundy left for Sarasota after New Year’s Day to continue his rehab.
He was 21. What made him special, his extraordinary right arm, was damaged. His most trusted confidante, his mother, was gone. He was 1,300 miles from home.
Bundy never uses the word “depression” to describe what he endured in those months, but he’s pretty sure that’s what blanketed him.
“I think I did (go through depression), just nobody really knew about it because I was in Florida,” Bundy said. “I was kind of by myself in Florida and my brother and my dad were back home. And they kind of were able to deal with it back home.”
A pall enveloped all the Bundy men.
No matter where Bobby drove to in Sperry, the baseball academy where he taught lessons, the facility where he rehabbed his arm, his brother’s house to check on things, he seemingly always passed the cemetery where his mother was buried.
The Bundy patriarch, tough, strong and fearless, now was attempting to deal with the most personal of all losses, the woman he was with for the better part of three decades. He needed to mourn, but he also had to be there for his adult sons, professional athletes attempting to salvage their careers in the lowest of times. All while running a household.
Advertisement
“Both the boys were in shock. Denver was in shock. I kind of stepped in and helped with things that Denver relied on Lori for,” April Bowman said. “It was a really tough time for all of them.”
Denver Bundy and his sons navigated their emotions together. They were always close, but this was different.
“I think life’s experiences always shape you and that one was pretty devastating,” Denver Bundy said. “It changed my life. I had my roles and Lori had her roles and now I’m having to do it all. And then my sons, who really relied on their mother as someone to talk to when they needed someone to feel for them a little bit, now they don’t have that. So now they have to talk to me more or to each other. I think they lean on each other a lot more than they used to when Lori was alive.”
(Photo: Gary Rohman-USA TODAY Sports)Because it’s so commonplace in baseball circles, because it’s been an accepted practice for roughly 40 years, because it seems like every pitcher deals with it at some point in his career, Tommy John surgery is viewed by outsiders as a temporary setback.
A torn ulnar collateral ligament on the inner side of the elbow is surgically replaced by a tendon harvested from another part of the body – often the hamstring tendon – to better secure the elbow joint and, theoretically, allow it to endure the pressure of hurling a baseball over and over. Get Tommy John, disappear for a year and then, voila, you’re back in the majors, probably throwing harder than ever.
It doesn’t always work that way.
Although it’s been damn near perfected since Dr. Frank Jobe performed it on big league pitcher Tommy John in 1974, it remains a significant surgery, one that offers no guarantees.
It includes a grueling, step-by-step rehab process that requires discipline – which Bundy possesses in abundance – and patience, which no one has at 21, especially a guy who made it to The Show roughly a year after high school.
Advertisement
There were two things that helped Bundy handle the daily torment in 2014.
One, his brother, was dealing with the same thing. Although Bundy was ahead of his older brother as far as the rehab process was concerned, Bobby Bundy had been through other surgeries previously. So, they compared notes on progress and hurdles.
Secondly, Bundy badly needed a mental distraction. Something to keep his mind away from the past December. He may be the only pitcher in history to view Tommy John recovery as a welcomed respite.
“Rehab was awful. It wasn’t fun. But once I was able to start throwing, you could see the energy in my eyes,” Bundy said. “I was able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I had something to keep my mind off (Lori’s death), and that was my throwing progression after the first of that year.”
He made it back to High-A ball by 2014 and looked primed for a return to the majors the following season. But life – and baseball – had other ideas.
Bundy made only eight starts in 2015 due to calcification in his right shoulder. He was shelved later that year in the Arizona Fall League due to elbow tightness. The whispers that he was injury-prone grew. Maybe all those years working out tirelessly had beaten down his body. Maybe, gasp, he was another Orioles first-round bust.
But no one – except the handful of people close to him – knew Dylan Bundy’s full story. They didn’t know that his mind could flip 900-pound tractor tires, too.
“What he went through, I don’t know if many kids our age at the time could have handled it like he did,” said Barret Bowman, Bundy’s best childhood friend. “He came home, his mom passes away, and shortly after that, he’s got to leave and go right back to work. He didn’t get to stay home and just be with family and cope with things like most of us would. I couldn’t imagine having to go through what he did or what that whole family did, you know?”
Don’t miss the forest for the pecan trees.
Advertisement
Whatever shenanigans happened on that property in Sperry, Oklahoma in the mid-to-late 2000s worked. Denver Bundy’s boys could play some baseball.
Bobby Bundy, now 28, had a full ride to pitch at the University of Arkansas had he not decided to go pro with the Orioles. He likely would have been drafted higher than the eighth round if he hadn’t torn his ACL playing basketball the previous November and was forced to wear a knee brace his entire senior baseball season.
He pitched nine years in the minors, topping out with two relief appearances at Triple-A, and retired from pro ball after last season.
He is plenty busy at home, giving lessons to kids at the Sperry Baseball Academy, following in the footsteps of his father the coach. He’s preparing to go back to college, potentially to be a teacher and to further his current career as a coach and instructor.
In 2008, Bobby Bundy was Oklahoma’s Gatorade Player of the Year. That award the next three years was won by his brother — the first player in any sport in any state to accomplish a three-peat. That’s four years, two Bundys, four consecutive Gatorade state honors.
As a senior, Dylan earned Gatorade’s national baseball award and the company’s overall top athlete distinction. Past recipients included LeBron James (2003) and Dwight Howard (2004).
The Bundys won the Oklahoma state championship together for Sperry when Bobby was a senior and Dylan a freshman. Dylan won another state title with Sperry as a sophomore – he hit a three-run homer and struck out 17 batters in a seven-inning complete game in the championship — then transferred to Owasso, a baseball powerhouse.
He made it to the state title game twice more with Owasso, though his team lost both times – including his senior year to Broken Arrow and Archie Bradley, the seventh overall pick of the 2011 draft and now a standout reliever for the Diamondbacks. Bundy couldn’t pitch against Bradley in a much-anticipated battle because he had been used to get Owasso to the title game.
Advertisement
Bundy’s statistics as a senior: 71 innings pitched, 20 hits allowed, 158 strikeouts, 0.20 ERA; .467 batting average, 11 homers, 54 RBIs as a switch-hitting third baseman; 3.7 grade point average.
“He dominated everybody,” said Barret Bowman, now a Tulsa firefighter. “I played right field our sophomore year and, in most games when he pitched, I never had a single ball hit to me.”
The bathtub story.
Bobby Bundy was 13 or 14 at the time and had had a bit of a rough go. Earlier that year, he tried to get the family’s riding mower as close to the property’s fishing bank as possible, only to have it slip into the pond. His dad was not pleased.
A few months later, while Denver Bundy was on a hunting trip, the Bundy boys did what they always did – worked out in their garage-turned-weight-room. It was a young athlete’s paradise, courtesy of their dad. He had built them a squat rack, a dumbbell rack, a pull-up bar.
The only catch – and it was a minimal one – is that before they started and once they were done, they had to move their mother’s Ford Expedition in and out of the garage. Bobby wasn’t driving age yet, but he had been handling the family’s tractor since he was 9. All he had to do was idle his Mom’s vehicle back and forth. No big deal.
That evening, Bobby made a mistake. The Expedition wasn’t idling quite right, and he was trying to figure it out. As it was moving, he meant to pump the brakes.
“I pressed the gas,” he said. “And I basically went plowing through the dumbbell rack, full of dumbbells, and that basically broke a couple studs that ended up cracking and destroying basically the back of our master bath and did some closet damage.”
Simply put, he drove into the bathroom. And his father would be home soon.
“I run inside, about half in tears and I’m like, ‘I’m running away. I am not staying in this house. Dad is coming home in two days,’” Bobby said. “This is it. This is the last thing I ever did. And Mom is sitting there trying to be cool, calm and collected, as she always was. Dylan’s like, ‘Oh man, you really messed up, bro.’ He’s not being of any help.”
Advertisement
Lori Bundy had two jobs: One, convince her son he’d survive the week. Two, fix this mess.
She called April Bowman, whose husband, Byron, rounded up some friends who worked in construction. They were at the Bundy house early the next morning to tackle the project.
“She had a hand in all of it, too. She was over there cutting two-by-fours,” Bobby Bundy said of his mom. “She goes and finds a bathtub that is freaking almost identical to the bathtub we had … But there’s an inch of concrete showing roughly the length of the bathtub (that didn’t reach the existing tile).
“So, my clever mom decides, ‘I can find a rug.’ She finds a rug that matches up with the bathtub perfectly. You can’t see there is an inch of concrete showing. And I’m thinking, ‘Man, this may work. I may not have to run away or find foster care.’”
The moment of truth occurred the next evening, when Dad returned from hunting and took a shower before dinner. He walked into the bathroom, noticed the new rug and complimented his wife on the purchase. But something seemed off. He lifted the rug and saw the tile.
“He notices everything. He’s just one of those guys,” Bobby Bundy said. “So, he comes back out and says, ‘Did anything happen?’ I think everyone started to feel a little bit of pressure and she came forward and fessed up.”
And Denver Bundy’s reaction?
Slightly miffed. He didn’t like that bathtub anyway. If he had known what had happened, he would have inserted a nicer bathtub, a bigger shower, maybe.
“All this time, I thought he would have been absolutely livid, and, he’s mad at me, but at the same time, he really isn’t as mad as I thought he’d be,” Bobby said. “It didn’t really have to be that bad. I mean, I didn’t sleep at night.”
Denver Bundy chuckles at the memory – and treasures what it still means.
“She gets that whole thing fixed while I’m gone. If they had gotten a tub that had fit the cutout in the floor better, I would’ve never known,’ he said. “They had everything fixed. That’s their relationship right there. She was willing to do just about anything for them.”
Advertisement
Dylan Bundy occasionally wonders what was going through his mom’s mind during those crazy times. What she really thought of the sprints to the stop sign or the tackling of trees.
“I don’t know,” Bundy says softly. “I can’t wait to ask her someday.”
(Photo: G Fiume/Getty Images)Pink cleats. One game. Pink cleats.
That’s the only public hint Bundy has ever shared about the loss of his mother.
“I didn’t really talk to anybody in the organization — players, media, coaches, nobody — anything about what happened with my mom,” Bundy said. “I don’t think hardly anybody knows really exactly what happened.”
At baseball’s winter meetings in 2013, Showalter informed local reporters that Bundy’s mom had passed away suddenly, details were limited, and the manager asked the media to respect the prospect’s privacy. And that was it.
Some Orioles know Mother’s Day week is rough on Bundy. But they have few specifics.
Bundy has had heartfelt conversations with his brother and his dad about the loss, but those remain private. Every December, when the Bundy men are together, they light a candle for Lori. And, occasionally while they are hunting or working on their houses and properties together in the offseason, one of them will bring up a Mom story, and the others will laugh.
“It still breaks my heart for those boys that they lost her, because they were all so close and she did hold them together,” April Bowman said. “But I do think Denver has done a fantastic job of holding them all together without her. When they’re home, they’re all hunting, they’re all doing stuff together.”
April Bowman now hears from Dylan Bundy on special occasions.
“It might be the first thing in the morning, it might be late at night or middle of the day,” she said, “but he always sends me some kind of nice something every Mother’s Day or on my birthday.”
Advertisement
This year, Bundy’s scheduled start fell on Mother’s Day, when Major League Baseball features pink bats, bases, equipment and uniform items, most of which is auctioned off for causes such as breast cancer awareness.
Bundy hadn’t participated much with it in the past. He isn’t one to whimsically replace his carefully selected equipment. But he felt the pull this year. He wore pink cleats. And he threw seven shutout innings in the Orioles’ blowout, 17-1 victory.
“It was pretty cool. Normally, I would never change cleats. I just don’t think any holiday is worth it to change up your routine on the mound when you’ve got a job to do,” Bundy said. “But I was like, “You know, heck, it’s been long enough. Five years now. I’m gonna wear these pink cleats to honor her.’”
Coincidentally, he also started on Father’s Day. He wore blue cleats, and he and the Orioles won again.
Bundy kept both sets of shoes. He’s giving them to his father to put into a homemade shadowbox.
As a symbol of the journey his parents, together, paved for their sons.
(Top photo of Dylan Bundy on Mother’s Day: Rob Carr/Getty Images)
ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57lGppcWlmZH9xfZdoZ3JnYWd8rbXFnqpmnailsrO1xKeanqtdlrm4rdisZKygkaWybsXOrmSappRiwamt02amp51drK60ec%2BrnK2sqWKxpsLArKuarJmjtG60zrBknbGclrturtSnm7KrXay8s7jDZpyxqJyksaawjJqlnWWYpMRutMRmp66rmJqxbsDHq6aun5hk