Madison Bumgarner and a First for the Decade
Twitter user and probably good person Cory Little brought something to my attention the other day. The San Francisco Giants were playing a game in Colorado, and, following a somewhat ordinary looking sequence of events, from the top of the fifth inning:
- Brandon Hicks flies out
- Brandon Crawford singles
- Tyler Colvin doubles
- Madison Bumgarner strikes out
- Gregor Blanco triples
- Hunter Pence singles
- Pablo Sandoval strikes out
Three-run inning for San Francisco. Three two-out runs. The Giants took the lead, though they’d ultimately lose on a walk-off. What’s interesting isn’t the sequence, as it’s presented. What’s interesting is the sub-sequence. Let’s zoom in on the Bumgarner strikeout. The six pitches:
- Ball
- Ball
- Ball
- Foul
- Foul
- Swinging strike
It’s not surprising Madison Bumgarner struck out. It’s surprising how he struck out. He got ahead 3-and-0, and then he swung and swung and swung. In other words, nevermind the last two swings. Bumgarner swung 3-and-0, and he swung because he was given the green light to swing. Bumgarner is a pitcher.
And he’s a pitcher with a career .185 wOBA. It’s actually .323 this year, but this year isn’t a year yet — and last year it was .142. Bumgarner is a poor hitting pitcher — like just about all pitchers — but he’d earned manager Bruce Bochy’s confidence. Because of that, Bumgarner was given an opportunity to drive a runner home if he saw a pitch he liked.
So what do we make of pitchers with 3-and-0 green lights? We can’t say how often a green light has been given, but we can say how often pitchers have swung. Bumgarner is the first pitcher with a 3-and-0 swing in 2014. There was none in 2013. There was none in 2012. There was none in 2011. There was none in 2010. Here’s everything I could find from the PITCHf/x era:
- June 5, 2009: Mike Hampton swings vs. Jeff Karstens
- May 23, 2008: Jeff Francis bunts vs. Aaron Heilman
- April 19, 2008: Wandy Rodriguez swings vs. Aaron Cook
That’s everything, and one of the swings is a bunt. Said Hampton, who had some pop:
In addition to his single in the third, Hampton also had a sacrifice fly in the sixth, getting the green light to swing on a 3-0 count. He is hitting .500 (8-for-16) in his last eight games.
“I looked down and I saw they wanted me to swing, and I was like, ‘Alright,'” Hampton said. “I was looking for a ball in, and he was out over the plate a little bit. I would rather have got a hit, but at least I got the run in.”
Since 2008, there have been four pitcher swings in 732 3-and-0 counts. That’s a rate of 0.5%. Over the same time, there have been 3,649 swings overall in more than 50,000 3-and-0 counts — excluding intentional walks — for a rate of 7.3%. Pitchers haven’t been given the green light, because pitchers suck, and if a pitcher has an opportunity to maybe draw a walk, managers generally prefer those odds.
So what can be said about this case? Bumgarner swinging was almost certainly a bad idea. Of course a pitcher needs to swing every so often, in theory, just to keep the opposing pitcher honest. But at 3-and-0, the opposing pitcher needs to throw three consecutive strikes. Pitchers aren’t so good at that. The idea was Bumgarner would be able to take a hack at a centered fastball. Conventional wisdom is that’s what 3-and-0 pitches look like. But while 92% of 3-and-0 pitches to pitchers have been fastballs, only about half have been in the strike zone. And only a fraction of those have been centered. Trust was put in Bumgarner’s discipline so he wouldn’t make an out on a pitch that wasn’t dead red, or that was dead red. More specifically, an unhelpful out, since a grounder or a medium fly could’ve scored the runner from third.
As it happened, Bumgarner did get a fastball, almost right down the middle:
And, from earlier this season, against the same team:
So it’s not like Bumgarner is completely helpless. For his career he hasn’t been a hacker, especially against heaters. Bumgarner very well could’ve put something in play, but again, where the at-bat might’ve begun with Bumgarner looking for a productive out. When the count goes to 3-and-0 your priority shifts to drawing a walk because the next guy is an actual hitter and a non-out is better than an out.
Bumgarner appreciated the confidence:
“That’s the first time I’ve had that. I was just trying to get something in the air,” he said (he struck out). “That showed a lot from a management standpoint to have that faith. It’s an honor to get to go up there and do that (get the green light and then hit in the seventh). As a staff, we’ve really been working hard on hitting, and if you get just one more hit that can help. We saw in 2010 it can come down to one game.”
From the Giants broadcast:
Kuiper: Walt Weiss just looked at Rene Lachemann and went, “Really?”
Krukow: It’s not something I’ve ever seen before.
For something so surprising, Bumgarner did manage to keep a straight face. Once he received his sign, there was no indication something unusual was up:
I’m uncomfortable declaring this a completely bad idea. Bumgarner has some ability, and maybe Bochy saw something. After all, Coors Field is enormous and friendly to balls in play. I’m comfortable declaring that this most likely was a bad idea because Bumgarner has never been much and Franklin Morales can struggle with strikes — which is how he wound up behind 3-and-0 to begin. More than anything, though, I’m glad things like this happen, just like I’m glad position players pitch and sometimes pitchers play the field. Madison Bumgarner swung 3-and-0 and became the first pitcher to do so in several years. It didn’t work out for him, but most plate appearances don’t work out for him. At least this one was interesting.
Jeff made Lookout Landing a thing, but he does not still write there about the Mariners. He does write here, sometimes about the Mariners, but usually not.
“Bumgarner is a poor hitting pitcher — like just about all pitchers…”
This may just be semantics, but while Bumgarner is a poor hitter like just about all pitchers, he’s actually a pretty good hitting pitcher. Starting with his rookie season in 2010 until now, there are 96 pitchers hitting an arbitrary cutoff of 100 PAs. In that group, he’s 18th in wRC+, 12th in ISO, and 18th in BB%.
http://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=p&stats=bat&lg=all&qual=100&type=8&season=2014&month=0&season1=2010&ind=0&team=0&rost=0&age=0&filter=&players=0&sort=17,d
I’m not sure that I would say there is 18 good hitting pitchers out of that group. “Good” does not have to mean above the 50th percentile or the 66th, etc. In this case, I wouldn’t include a career 14 wRC+ as being good for a pitcher.
It didn’t work out for Bumgarner this time but it didn’t not work out either. Looks to me like the pitch likely would have been a called strike if he hadn’t swung (especially given that umpires are more likely to call a pitch a strik with a 3-0 count), so he would still have been down 0-1 in the count if he had taken the pitch.
This. It was actually a decent looking hack.
However – that’s not really the point of the article. From a game theory point of view, Morales was more likely to throw yet another ball than Bumgarner was to get a hittable pitch. We can’t just look at the result (decent pitch to hit) and say automatically that the correct call was made. If you forced Morales to groundhog day that 3-0 pitch 1000 times, he probably fails to get it in a high enough % of the time that it the correct call is to keep the bat on the shoulder.
On the other hand, if as a manager you thought you could trust Bumgarner to lay off a ball and only swing at good pitches – Bochy made the right decision. So I guess the bottom line is “does Bumgarner really have good enough plate discipline to justify this?” The whole stadium knew that a fastball was about to be thrown, so that helps and makes it so we can’t just blindly look at his O-zone %, but the guy is a pitcher.
How can baseball be so complicated? For just one pitch? Awesome.
Presumably if Bumgarner had the green light at 3-0 he also had it earlier and was able to lay off pitches outside the zone.
He wouldn’t have been down 0-1. He would have been ahead 3-1 in the count.
The only reason it “didn’t not work out” is because he wasn’t able to put the ball in play. He almost certainly would have made an out — as pitchers do almost every time they take the bat off their shoulders — and so his foul ball gave him a 2nd chance to earn a walk.
FWIW – In the Retrosheet era (1950-2013), 83 pitchers have swung on a 3-0 count. Barry Lersch and Larry Christenson did it twice in one game.
Not the same game, though that would be awesome.
Dude takes a hack! His only problem is he’s standing on the wrong side of the plate.
I am a HUGE fan of this and am surprised at how rare it is. A big part of baseball is game theory. If opposing pitchers KNOW that a pitcher will never swing at 3-0, they could just throw get me over fastballs right down the middle every time and get to 3-1. I realize a lot of times that is exactly what they do, but not always. A manager probably is very happy with a walk as an outcome for his pitcher batting. The best way to do that, is to keep the opponents thinking that you might swing, and force them to aim pitches on the paint or outside the zone. The pitcher needs to have some nervousness that if he leaves a pitch down the middle it will get swung at for a hit. If you really want a walk, a good strategy is to swing and intentionally miss at 3-0. That forces the pitcher to throw 2 more strikes, with some fear that if the pitch catches too much of the plate it will be hit.
Of course, in this situation, what Bumgarner did made no difference. If he had take that 3-0 pitch, the count would still have been 3-1 and the outcome would likely have been no different. But next time he’s up 3-0 the opposing pitcher if more likely to try and be too fine, and may miss the strike zone altogether.
“If opposing pitchers KNOW that a pitcher will never swing at 3-0, they could just throw get me over fastballs right down the middle every time and get to 3-1.”
Even get me over fastballs miss. And frankly, I suspect this is very close to the current strategy pitchers as pitchers to pitchers as hitters employ, and yet the pitcher-hitters get walked on fourt straight sometimes.
The game theorist in me thinks that pitchers swing far too often. They’re almost certain to make outs, so they need to swing less frequently in an attempt to get more get-me-over fastballs. Swinging, for them, tends to waste their opportunity to get on base.
I would guess that, for most pitchers, an optimal swing strategy would be to only swing when there are 2 strikes — and even then, probably less often than they do now.
This just makes me like Bumgarner even more. (Which is tough, as I am a Giants fan and he is entertaining in his actual job of throwing baseballs.) If there was any pitcher I would expect to do this, it would be Bumgarner, who appears to approach every at-bat like he’s expecting to hit himself a dinger. The fact that he’s so rarely successful (3 career home runs!) doesn’t seem to slow him down at all. It’s sort of endearing.
Bumgarner hits balls out of the park in batting practice. Because of this, Bochy has decided that MadBum is a good hitter. The “genius” even uses him as a pinch hitter fairly often.
Bumgarner has one career PA as a pinch hitter. Facts are fun.
And I believe that PA came when the Giants had used up all of their position players and he was pinch hitting for a reliever. And given what happened last night, I hope a Giants reliever never takes another at bat ever again.
Yes, that was just a couple weeks ago and it was a particularly weird game, featuring atrocious play in every facet of the game by both the Giants and the Pirates. Having a starting pitcher pinch hit was one of the less odd things about that game.
http://www.fangraphs.com/wins.aspx?date=2014-05-05&team=Pirates&dh=0&season=2014
Yeah, no.
It surprised me when I watched it too, but the 3-0 pitch was a fastabll right down the middle that almost certainly would have been called a strike, particularly since umpires tend to expand the strikezone on 3-0 especially when a pitcher is batting. So I don’t see the problem given that he is a competent hitter for a pitcher and got exactly what he was looking for.
In some ways, getting the green light on 3-1 was less defensible than giving it to him on 3-0 since the difference in probability of success between Bumgarner hitting 3-1 versus 3-2 is less than the probability that the pitcher will throw something other than a fastball down the middle 3-1 following Bumgarner taking a swing on 3-0. And given how Morales was pitching, if he’s doing anything other than a fastball right in the middle of the strikezone, there’s a good chance that it would have been a ball (in fact, that second swing-in-miss looked like it would likely have been called ball 4).
Followed MadBum since the 8th grade and to call him a bad hitting pitcher is abserb. He is an athlete of uncanny ability. He can throw in the 98 mph range but prefers to pitch under control which most of you can not understand. How many times has Bochey pulled him in the early 6th inning with a lead and they lose the game. He is 6’5″ and 245 lbs. Let him pitch some 8 and 9 inning games and he will win 18 to 20 games a year. He deserves the at bats and a higher pitch count. He is your Ace! Treat him like one! Pay him what he is worth too!
I have also followed Bumgarner since he joined the Giants’ rotation with me. Us starters hold a throwing competition each month, and Bumgarner has never hit 98. Also, he is only 6’4″ and 225 lbs. Also, I am the ace of the staff not Bumgarner. Also, he is not that great of an athlete. Also, basically everything you said is false, especially the part where you claim to know him since the 8th grade which 1) is very unlikely and 2) even if it were true, it would not make your idiotic opinion seem more trustworthy.
Sincerely,
Matt Cain
P.S. Please buy more of my jersey t-shirts.
You wrote “abserb.”
Don’t know why that’s a problem. It’s a perfectly cromulent word.