World Series 2014: Madison Bumgarner Rises to the Moment, and Jaws Drop
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Now he belongs to history, alongside Christy Mathewson and Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson and Randy Johnson. The pantheon of World Series pitching greatsmust welcome a new member. Madison Bumgarner burst into the club with a performance for the ages in Game 7 of the World Series on Wednesday.
Bumgarner, a bearded left-hander from Hickory, N.C., squeezed the life from the plucky Kansas City Royals with fastballs, cutters and curveballs slung sideways from an arm that had only two days’ rest. Bumgarner, 25, shut out the Royals on two hits for the final five innings, saving a 3-2 victory for the San Francisco Giants and clinching the team’s third championship in five seasons.
“You know what?” said Bumgarner, who pitched 270 innings this season, including a postseason-record 522/3. “I can’t lie to you anymore. I’m a little tired now.”
Bumgarner, who worked seven innings to win Game 1 and fired a shutout in Game 5, has earned a long winter’s nap. He was named the most valuable player of the World Series, naturally, for his excellence in shouldering a workload that brings to mind the durable and dominant aces of old.
World Series: Game 7
Late Tuesday night, after the Giants’ 10-0 loss in Game 6, Bumgarner showed the attitude of an earlier generation. He dismissed any concerns about working on short rest, guessing that his limit would be 200 pitches while sniffing that pitch counts, to him, were overrated. He insisted he would be just as effective as usual and doubted he would have trouble warming up.
“Something tells me it won’t take long to get loose in Game 7 of the World Series,” he said.
Bumgarner, who wore down a bit last season as he reached 200 innings, had prepared for this moment. All year long, he varied his workouts between starts with the hope of maintaining his strength for a deep October run. He started the Giants’ surge with a shutout in the wild-card game, at Pittsburgh on Oct 1.
After starting against St. Louis in the finale of the National League Championship Series — for which he was also named M.V.P. — Bumgarner threw only a light bullpen session before Game 1 of the World Series. After winning that game, and allowing just one run, he did not throw in the bullpen before Game 5. He also rested between Games 5 and 7.
“He backed off,” said Dave Righetti, the Giants’ pitching coach. “He saved it for the baseball games.”
Bumgarner’s final World Series line sparkles: 2-0 with a save and a 0.43 earned run average, with nine hits, one run, one walk and 17 strikeouts in 21 innings. Add in 15 scoreless innings in earlier victories, against Texas in 2010 and Detroit in 2012, and you get a 0.25 E.R.A. that ranks as the best in World Series history, minimum 25 innings.
“It’s really special to keep hearing that,” Bumgarner said. “Obviously, it hasn’t sunk in yet. There’s not been near enough time to think about it. This is as good as it gets, World Series, Game 7. It’s pretty stressful at the same time.”
Yet Bumgarner showed no nerves. Replacing Jeremy Affeldt for the bottom of the fifth, Bumgarner was every bit as stingy as he had promised, even though his fastball was not its sharpest right away. In some ways, Righetti said, it helped him to allow a leadoff single to Omar Infante.
“Normally a starter comes out — because he’s got all his time to warm up, he’s got his best heater, and it probably drops down in the second inning,” Righetti said of a reliever. “That’s almost every guy. He had to start the other way. As a reliever — and not a closer — he had to build. I think he was at 90 and 91, and he was in the stretch right away. He had to go into a slide step right away. So he pitched. He got out of it.”
Righetti continued: “The next inning he went out a little early and started to loosen up a little better. I think he went up to 93 then, and he was in his normal range.”
After that, Righetti said, he studied the fingers on Bumgarner’s left hand. If he was keeping them on top of the ball, Righetti said, he would not make mistakes. That is where Bumgarner kept them.
On the bench between innings, Manager Bruce Bochy said, he deliberately tried to avoid Bumgarner. The only way he would take him out, Bochy said, was if Bumgarner told him he was tired. Bochy did not want to hear those words, and Bumgarner was not about to say them.
“There was nothing,” Bumgarner said when asked if there were conversations about how long he would last. “I was just concentrating on making pitches. I wasn’t thinking about how many innings I was going to go or how many pitches or any of that. Just thinking about getting outs.”
The outs kept piling up, 14 in a row, until there was only one to go in the ninth.
Alex Gordon, who had flied to center to end in the sixth, lined an 0-1 slider to center, and it skipped past Gregor Blanco. Gordon scurried around second, and the Royals’ third-base coach, Mike Jirschele, could have sent him home. But Jirschele held Gordon as shortstop Brandon Crawford took the throw from left fielder Juan Perez, and the Royals took their chances on bringing him home another way.
The task fell to Salvador Perez, the Royals’ catcher, whose Game 1 homer is the only blemish on Bumgarner’s World Series record. Perez is dangerous but a free swinger, and Bumgarner used his approach against him.
“You see how he pitched to him,” Righetti said. “He threw him all balls, didn’t he?”
That was the plan, Bumgarner said, and it worked.
“I knew Perez was going to want to do something big,” Bumgarner said. “I had a really good chance, too. We tried to use that aggressiveness and throw our pitches up in the zone. It’s a little bit higher than high, I guess.”
Pumping those high fastballs, Bumgarner got ahead in the count, 1-2, and then threw a ball before Perez hit a foul ball. Righetti said Bumgarner would have faced the next hitter, left-handed Mike Moustakas, but closer Santiago Casilla most likely would have faced Infante with the bases loaded had things gotten that far.
They never did. Perez swung hard at a 93-mile-per-hour fastball and lofted it high into the night. Third baseman Pablo Sandoval camped under the ball, caught it and fell to the ground in front of the Giants’ dugout, his wide body spread near the World Series logo, arms raised by his sides in triumph.
Catcher Buster Posey flung his face mask in the air and wrapped Bumgarner in an embrace, burying his head in the pitcher’s chest as the Giants swarmed onto the field.
Mathewson spun three shutouts for the New York Giants in the 1905 World Series, always the standard for greatness. But this was about as close as any pitcher has come since.
At 0.43, Bumgarner’s E.R.A. is the lowest in a World Series for pitchers with at least 15 innings since Koufax’s 0.38 mark in 1965. That was when Koufax pitched a shutout on two days’ rest on the road in Game 7 to stifle the Minnesota Twins.
Bumgarner, a first-round pick out of South Caldwell (N.C.) High School in 2007, is 67-49 in his regular-season career with a 3.06 E.R.A. This year was his best, at 18-10 and 2.98. He is keenly aware of other left-handers who have pitched longer and accomplished more, and he studies them intently.
“This guy wants to be great,” Righetti said. “He loves it. He appreciates Clayton Kershaw and Jon Lester a lot, and David Price. He wants what they’ve got; he wants to be better — and now they probably are hoping they’ve got what he’s got, too. And that’s what great pitchers do, especially left-handers, because there’s so few left-handed power guys. They drag each other to greatness, and he’s part of it, and we’re lucky to have him.”
Because of Bumgarner’s brilliance, these Royals — a bottom-half team in payroll, a team without a playoff appearance in 29 years — now belong to a special group of teams in baseball history. Think of the Boston Red Sox in 1967, the season known as the Impossible Dream, or the 1991 Atlanta Braves, who went from worst to first.
Those teams, like the Royals, came from relative obscurity to push destiny as far as they could without winning. The journey of all of those teams ended in Game 7 of the World Series.
“For them to play the way they did on this stage, in this postseason, is phenomenal,” Royals Manager Ned Yost said of his players. “I’m really proud of the way they played.”
The Royals have no reason to be ashamed. They were beaten by the best. They were beaten by Bumgarner.
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