The calendar, not to mention instinct well-tuned over a life spent in the game, tell Mike Lum he should be on a baseball field somewhere right now with a bat in his hands.

For nearly 70 years — 58 of them in professional baseball since graduating from Roosevelt High — his Aprils have been dedicated to either hitting a baseball or teaching somebody else the finer points of it.

It is an art he has practiced and preached from Hawaii to the Dominican Republic. “It has been my life, my job for so many years,” Lum said.

But COVID-19 has thrown both Lum and the sports world a curve like never before.

“It is weird,” Lum said. “There was the strike in 1981 (June 12-Aug. 8 when 38% of the season was lost), but this is crazy. You don’t know what to expect.”

At age 74 Lum is one of baseball’s admired elders, a senior adviser for player development with the Pittsburgh Pirates, passing on a career’s worth of lessons to the organization’s players and hitting coaches.

With the restrictions on travel and gatherings these days that means video conferencing from his San Francisco home until MLB gives the all-clear signal to return to the diamond. Whenever that might be. “I’m trying to figure out how they would salvage the season,” Lum said.

Meanwhile it has given him time to reflect on a career path that was unimaginable coming out of high school. A celebrated all-around athlete for the Rough Riders and ILH back of the year in 1962, Lum had a football scholarship offer to play quarterback at Brigham Young and the attention of major league scouts for baseball at a time when you could only do one or the other in college.

He spent a semester at BYU before signing with the then-Milwaukee Braves. He broke into the majors with the Atlanta Braves in 1967, where he spent 12 of his 15 big league seasons as a first baseman, outfielder and pinch hitter.

Lum’s best season was 1973 when he hit .294 with 82 RBI and 16 home runs. In 1974 he was on base when Hank Aaron hit the record-tying 714th career home run.

Between the Braves and parts of three seasons with Cincinnati’s celebrated “Big Red Machine,” the heavy competition for a place in the lineup drove Lum to make a deep study of the science of hitting.

His knowledge was such that when his playing days ended after the 1982 season in Japan, Aaron summoned him back to the Braves to become a hitting instructor. In Lum, Aaron and others saw a “giver,” someone with lessons to teach, a pride in his craft and a willingness to share with anyone who asks.

Since then Lum has been with five other teams, including the Chicago White Sox who tapped him as a tutor for Michael Jordan in the great experiment of 1994.

These days, while waiting for baseball to restart, Lum has immersed himself in analytics. “I want to be able to better communicate with the young (players) about how to make them better and take advantage of all these tools we have available now,” Lum said.

Meanwhile, he says, “friends in Hawaii ask me, ‘When are you going to retire?’ I tell them, ‘It is like I’ve been retired all my (working) life. Where am I going to have a job where I get to be around baseball all the time and talk about what I love?’ I’m having too much fun to retire.”

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.