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Before he was MadBum, postseason legend, owner of an unrivaled World Series resume and snotrocket record, he was a teenager beginning his professional dream.
And he was annoyed.
“I’ll never forget,” began Ross Grimsley, Bumgarner’s Single- and Double-A pitching coach, “They wanted to change his delivery at the beginning. He said, ‘I can’t do this.’ I said, ‘Then don’t do it. Do what got you here. Do what’s natural to you.’”
Bumgarner’s 2008 season — a year after pitching against high schoolers in North Carolina — is the stuff of minor league legend. The year-end numbers tell half the story: a 1.46 ERA, 164 strikeouts and just 21 walks in 141 2/3 innings for a pitcher who began the season 18 years old.
But those numbers included a rough start, 10 runs in 11 2/3 innings in his first three outings. With Single-A Augusta from April 24 to Aug. 27, a wiry Bumgarner went 14-1 while posting a 0.90 ERA in 130 innings.
Grimsley saw it all from the Georgia dugout, watched a pitcher who really only knew a mid-90s fastball and improving breaking ball pick apart every hitter he would face.
“He just dominated. At the lower levels, you want guys that are aggressive and throw strikes. That’s all he did. He just dominated,” Grimsley said over the phone this week.
#SFGiants ace Madison Bumgarner turns 30 today. This is what he looked like as an 18-year-old with the Augusta @GreenJackets back in the day: pic.twitter.com/jdRhELE6Vd
— Minor League Baseball (@MiLB) August 1, 2019
The longtime Giants coach, who spent 14 seasons with the organization ending in 2014, was Bumgarner’s first and third professional pitching coach, going from Augusta in 2008 to Double-A Connecticut the next season, only missing Bumgarner’s brief High-A San Jose stint. The phenom already was making noise that a promotion should be coming, having kept his unorthodox, almost sidearm delivery because rarely is the stubborn Bumgarner made to change what works.
What he hadn’t yet done was mastered a third pitch that he would need for the big leagues.
“We were working on his changeup in Double-A, [and] it was a hard thing to get him to do because it was a pitch batters would hit,” said Grimsley, now with 105.7 The Fan in Baltimore. “And he hated that — he didn’t want to get hit. But you couldn’t do that at the big-league level, you need more than two pitches.
“I remember we were playing Altoona, and he gave up several hits on a changeup and got frustrated. ‘Bum, you gotta throw it.’ He just hated to do it.”
But he did anyway because Bumgarner, too, knew he would need it. As much as anything that stuck out on Bumgarner — the 6-foot-4 frame, the left arm that appeared made out of rubber and still has not incurred natural injury, the country-strong kid who, by personality, was born a few generations late, it was his mind and eyes that captivated Grimsley.
Nowadays, heads are buried in iPads that reflect launch angles and ball flights. Bumgarner, while he does pay attention to the advanced analytics, views the game more as art than science.
“He’s always watched the game. A lot of the guys, they don’t watch the game — they watch it but they don’t see it. They rely more on analytics, they trust that more than they do the eyes,” said Grimsley, himself a lefty who threw 2,000 innings in the ’70s and early ’80s. “Bumgarner is a guy — even then, he was able to watch the game and dissect it, ‘This guy’s doing this and not doing that.’
“He’s right on the rail, he’s listening. He’s not afraid to ask questions. Always trying to get the little edge — you just wish everyone was as intent in listening as he was.”
Bumgarner would talk with the coaching staff and with his teammates, but a private person was especially so before he burst into the public eye. Grimsley described him as “naive” and “low-key.” “You would never know he was there.”
Sometimes that was by design, though.
“He spent a lot of time in the cage,” said Grimsley of Bumgarner, who didn’t get a chance to hit his first professional season. “He’d sneak in when we weren’t around. He could do everything — he’s a super athlete, he knows how to take care of himself. He respects that part of the game, he respects his teammates, his opponents, until they do something to piss him off.”
In essence, Bumgarner was, well, Bumgarner. His repertoire has changed, even if the person hasn’t.
But of course, the uniform has. Three World Series later, the Giants and Bumgarner officially split this week, as a rebuilding club didn’t blow him away with a huge contract, and a 30-year-old sought out Arizona, a team that has better chances of immediately winning and a place that has always been another home for him.
“I still look at him as a young guy. Nothing that he has accomplished is really surprising,” Grimsley said. “When you get around him, much like a Buster Posey when you first saw him or a Cal Ripken, you knew, this guy, if he doesn’t get hurt, he’s gonna be a really outstanding player.”
