The end of Madison Bumgarner, Good Major League Pitcher

It happened a while ago

A week ago, the Diamondbacks DFA’d Madison Bumgarner due to his poor performance and general dickery.. Yesterday, they officially released him, putting an end to his 5-year tenure in the desert just 3 years in.

It’s not hard to see why Arizona got rid of Bumgarner, even though they owe him $34 million over the rest of his contract. In his Diamondbacks career, he’s never been a good pitcher, but he fell apart in the early going in 2023, with a 10.26 ERA in 16.2 innings. In his best game of the year, he went 4.2 innings against the Dodgers, gave up 3 runs (2 earned), struck out 5, and walked 6.

It simply wasn’t working for Bumgarner in Arizona. It had never worked either, considering that of every pitcher who’s ever thrown 200 innings in his Diamondbacks career, Bumgarner has the fourth-worst fWAR, one spot ahead of fellow Giants legend Yusmeiro Petit, and two spots behind Giants non-legend Livan Hernandez.

So what happened to Bumgarner? It’s possible this all goes back to 2017. If you’ll recall the 2017 baseball season, and if you’re a Giants fan I recommend you not recall the 2017 baseball season, then you’ll remember that a few weeks into the season, Bumgarner got injured washing his truck in a dirt bike accident. He came back a couple months later and was an effective pitcher for the rest of the season (and the rest of his Giants career), but there was a bit of a drop-off.

From 2009 to 2016, Bumgarner had a 2.99 ERA, 123 ERA+, 3.12 FIP with 8.9 K/9, 0.8 HR/9, and 2.1 BB/9.

From 2017 to 2019, Bumgarner had a 3.57 ERA, 115 ERA+, 3.94 FIP with 8.3 K/9, 1.2 HR/9, and 2.1 BB/9.

Since 2020, Bumgarner has had a 5.23 ERA, 80 ERA+, 5.18 FIP with 6.8 K/9, 1.6 HR/9, and 2.9 BB/9.

2017 is where the decline started. 2017 is where he suffered his first major injury. Put those together, and draw the line from A to B, and then you can tell everyone, “Hey, there’s a line here!”

But, I mean, that’s not necessarily the whole story. Even before that injury, Bumgarner’s fastball had lost a few ticks:

You can see that in 2016, he’d lost 1-2 MPH off where his fastball had been the year before; he had a slight recovery pre-dirt bike, but not enough to get him all the way back. His velocity in 2019 was very similar to his velocity in 2016, even if the 2019 trend (peak in the middle of the year) wasn’t particularly similar to his 2016 trend (dip in July, gained every month after that).

In 2020, Bumgarner came into Spring Training sitting at 90-91 MPH on his fastball, but during the actual season, he was more at 87-88. That could be because of the accelerated 3-week training camp schedule that year (I refuse to call it Spring Training when it happened in July) or it could be something else; I remember hearing whispers about conditioning, which seems very unlike Bumgarner, but would explain a lot. Regardless, he was back close to major league velocity in 2021, if at the lower end of acceptable, and then picked it up a notch in 2022 before falling off a cliff this year.

There’s more to pitching than just velocity, of course, as you’ll hear from this article (via Mike Petriello):

Bumgarner’s struggles were not new to this season. He posted a 7.12 ERA over his final 10 starts of last year. His stuff often appeared noncompetitive; according to a source, players on a rival team talked about adjusting to the quality of his stuff in the same way that they would adjust to a position player pitching.

One theory I’ve seen is that as pitchers age, they become worse. Seems kinda fishy, but I guess I’ll hear it out. But there’s also the mileage. Bumgarner had put a lot of innings on his arm with the Giants. He pitched 2200 regular season innings with San Francisco, plus another 100 in the postseason. That’s a lot of stress, a lot of effort, a lot of muscles straining to do things that they really shouldn’t be doing.

Back in the old days, this was simply how it went. Bumgarner is 33 right now, and 33 wasn’t an abnormal age at which a player could be cooked. You pitch your innings, and eventually you wear down. But with the big contracts in baseball today, people expect more. They expect you to maintain your production so you’ll be worth the money the team is paying you. Is that reasonable? I don’t know, but it’s not likely to work out.

There is another option, though. The best team in the early going this year is the Tampa Bay Rays, and they don’t do any of that old-school baseball shit. It’s inefficient. Worse, it means they’ll have to pay a player millions of dollars that they would very much prefer to not pay him. So what they do is this:

They make every pitcher’s stuff as nasty as possible and don’t worry about injuries because they can just get another one. Players are fungible. If one guy breaks, the next steps up. You don’t have one horse that you ride; instead, as you go along the trail, you simply steal whatever horse you see, ride it as long as it’ll let you, and then abandon it and get another one whenever necessary.

Look, I know horses don’t really work that way, but plese give me a break on this one. I’m a bit constrained by baseball’s established equine metaphor.

The upside to this strategy is that you don’t have a situation where you sign a Madison Bumgarner and the signing is a disaster. The downside is that you don’t get the legend of a Madison Bumgarner on your team for a decade.

Which philosophy is better? I mean, neither seems perfect. The Giants, as much as they’re now a Smart Team who does things Smart Ways, are still much more in the Ride Your Horse camp than the Ride Many Horses one. But yes, it’s entirely possible that 8 years from now, Logan Webb will look like absolute garbage because he threw so many innings at the beginning of his career. It’s absolutely a danger, even if he has a great career between now and then.

Guys wear out. Guys get bad. It happened very quickly to Tim Lincecum, it happened a bit more slowly to Matt Cain, and now it’s happened to Madison Bumgarner. I don’t know if there’s a third act to his major league career; it seems doubtful, but in a world where Ryan Vogelsong is possible, anything is possible. But for now, Bumgarner is not playing major league baseball. Though I guess, to the Diamondbacks, he hadn’t really been playing major league baseball for the last couple of years.