The bigger the game, the bigger Madison Bumgarner's legend grows
NEW YORK – He finished his game in a quiet stadium, nothing really but the sound of his own breath, the hiss of his fastball, and then the plock when the ball ended in the catcher’s mitt, the echo when the ball was struck just off center again. Nothing really but the sound of sneakers and loafers and work boots and Florsheims tracking up the concrete steps, nowhere to go but away from here.
He finished his game 27 outs after he started it, on yet another October night when all that stood between them and winter was him, the big ol’ lug who is sublime from April to September and then better after that.
“I wish I had an answer for you,” Madison Bumgarner said early Thursday morning, his left arm blotched red from ice. “I don’t.”
The San Francisco Giants are alive – still, again, and who are those guys? – because Bumgarner took the ball at 8:10 p.m. Citi Field time, returned it three hours, 11 minutes later, and put them all on a plane bound for Chicago and a National League division series against the Cubs. They were 3-0 winners in a one-swing game against the New York Mets and Noah Syndergaard, that bled into the Mets’ bullpen, that happened upon journeyman (and eight-hole hitter) Conor Gillaspie against closer Jeurys Familia, that cleared the right center-field fence with one out in the ninth inning, that sent the Mets home and the Giants to Wrigley Field.
That’s when Bumgarner, pitching for three hours in a grand booing and hollering and cheering and gasping pit of love and dread and hope, threw the last of his 119 pitches, and won the latest of his postseason starts, and finally pumped his fists in a place that had gone quieter than his long and languid delivery. He has not allowed a run in his past 23 postseason innings. That includes the final five innings of the 2014 World Series, which went seven games and ended in a cable car parade. That includes Game 5 of that World Series. That does not include the first game of that postseason, when a rather clunky, teetering, 88-win, second wild card-qualifying Giants team traveled to Pittsburgh and then had Bumgarner throw nine shutout innings.
Beginning in 2010, the first of three Giants’ titles across five seasons, back when he was 21 years old and beating the Atlanta Braves in Atlanta and the Texas Rangers in Texas in a lightning-strike postseason, Bumgarner is 8-3 with a 1.94 ERA in 15 playoff games. His ERA in eight postseason road games, six of them starts, all of them in air so thick you have to take it in in small bites, is 0.50. This, too, in an era of hair-trigger (and sometimes blind) bullpen matchups and scouting saturation and specialization. This, too, at a time of pitch counts and stress indicators and exploding elbow ligaments.
Along comes Bumgarner, pitching as long and hard as it takes, stoic when need be, snarling when need be, even lucky when need be, and seemingly always standing there with the baseball in his hand just before everybody opens the beer.
Somebody gets a hit. This time, Gillaspie, the forgotten first-rounder from eight years ago, did. Somebody makes a play. This time, Bumgarner himself, snared a lined comebacker to end the eighth inning with a Met in scoring position. Somebody fades away. This time, Syndergaard, the stud with the blazing fastball who didn’t allow a hit until the sixth inning, until his 85th pitch, ran out of pitches after seven innings.
Leaving Bumgarner, 27 years old, a figure sent ahead from a different epoch to remind us that not all men (or elbows) are built the same, that some are still capable of rising above the hand-wringing of a hundred pitches or four days’ rest or a third and fourth time through a big-league batting order. Just to be on the safe side Wednesday night, he threw 21 pitches through the first three innings. All but a couple of those pitches were fastballs. The Mets, either jumpy or strategically aggressive, mustered one hit, a single, and that was gone on a double-play grounder on the very next pitch. In the fourth inning, after all those fastballs, Bumgarner and his catcher, Buster Posey, chased the Mets with a load of breaking balls, and by the middle innings it was clear that what would come next was one swing. One damned swing was going to change everything.
“Yeah,” Bumgarner said, “most games are like that the deeper they get, and usually that’s the case. … But you can’t go out there and pitch scared like you’re afraid to give up that home run. You’ve got to throw every pitch with conviction and believe it’s the right one and just try to execute it. I mean, that’s really it.”
The Mets hit 218 home runs in the regular season, second to only the St. Louis Cardinals in the National League. The Giants hit 130, better than only two teams in the National League. So Mets fans waved their orange hankies and watched the likes of Yoenis Cespedes and Curtis Granderson and Jay Bruce come and go, and watched Syndergaard come and go, and then watched the bullpen door swing open.
Along came Familia. Brandon Crawford doubled. Angel Pagan struck out in an at-bat mostly spent trying to bunt Crawford to third. Joe Panik walked on a full-count pitch. Without that walk, the Mets intentionally walk Gillaspie and, if nothing else, get a pinch-hitter for Bumgarner (Jarrett Parker was on deck) and into the Giants’ uneven bullpen. But, nowhere to put the left-handed-hitting Gillaspie, Familia threw a strike, then a ball, and then a 96-mph fastball that Gillaspie hit over everybody’s head.
Parker rushed to the plate to greet Gillaspie and was standing alongside Crawford and Panik when he arrived. Bruce Bochy, the Giants manager, was shouting at Parker to come back. He’d just lost his at-bat.
“I told Bum, ‘Listen, we score and you’re still in there,’ ” Bochy recounted. “‘But I’ve got to take a shot at it.’
“I’ll be honest, I was a little nervous because Parker was there in the batter’s box high-fiving [Gillaspie]. I’m screaming to get him out of there. I didn’t want to put him in because Bum was hitting.”
Simple as could be, Bumgarner finished the Mets in the ninth, in a quiet stadium, nothing really but the sound of his own legend growing, the big ol’ lug.
