PHOENIX, Arizona–In the top half of the seventh inning on Saturday evening, Giants’ pitcher Madison Bumgarner had a chance to alter the outcome of the game with his bat.
With San Francisco trailing 2-1, and runners on first and second with two out, Bumgarner stood in against Andrew Chafin with a chance to do some damage.
After swinging and whiffing at the first two pitches of the at-bat, Bumgarner watched the third pitch sail by off the outside corner. The count should have run to 1-2, but instead, home plate umpire Jerry Meals called Chafin’s 95-mile per hour sinker strike three, much to the surprise of Bumgarner and Giants’ manager Bruce Bochy.
Immediately following the strike call, Bumgarner remained in the batter’s box to express his opinion on the pitch to Meals.
“I just said what I thought and he told me what he thought and that was it,” Bumgarner said. “I mean, Jerry (Meals) has always been really good for me, that’s not to say that a guy is not going to miss one, or I’m not going to see something that I thought I saw and I was wrong. We’re both human and that’s just the way it works.”
The called third strike was clearly off the plate, and robbed Bumgarner of an opportunity to help his team out with a runner in scoring position. Ultimately, that at-bat was the Giants’ last chance with a runner on base, as the lineup went down in order in the eighth and ninth innings.
Would Bumgarner have preferred a different result? Absolutely. Does he think Major League Baseball should do away with umpires calling balls and strikes? Absolutely not.
“Don’t get me wrong, I definitely, I enjoy the human element of the game,” Bumgarner said. “I’ve said that plenty of times before. I’m not advocating for the stupid electronic strike zone. I don’t even like replay. I wish we could go back to playing baseball the way it’s supposed to be played. We’ll never go back, I’m sure, but that’s just my opinion. Everybody has one.”
The fact Bumgarner was allowed to hit for himself in the top of the seventh was another sign that Bochy believes his ace is showing no ill-effects from the shoulder injury that kept him out of action for nearly three full months this season.
One of the strongest hitting pitchers in the game, Bumgarner is always capable of doing damage at the plate. In a 2-1 game, Bochy figured he’d give his ace a chance to hit and then pitch the seventh, but that chance didn’t materialize the way the Giants hoped.
“Unfortunately he had a pretty tough pitch there called on him to end that at-bat,” Bochy said. “Unfortunately he had no chance on that pitch.”