Madison Bumgarner, The Rental

There are a handful of different lenses through which we can perceive Madison Bumgarner’s career. What’s most typical is to picture him as Madison Bumgarner, the Playoff Hero. Dodger fans likely perceive him as Madison Bumgarner, the Cantankerous Ace. He has been an innings eater, a front-end starter, and an intense competitor throughout. Here though, we focus on Madison Bumgarner, the Rental.

If you didn’t already know, it is now July. July is a pivotal time for a lot of baseball teams. Many teams’ performances over the next 2-3 weeks will directly impact clubhouse additions and subtractions everywhere. It won’t take weeks to determine that the Giants will be one of those teams looking to add by subtraction though. 

MLBTR has covered the possibility of Madison Bumgarner being moved by the Giants. Fangraphs is even more bullish about the likelihood that he ends up elsewhere. To that end, what follows is a brief discussion about what a buyer might expect upon landing a player like Bumgarner. 

After being a paragon of durability, Bumgarner has dealt with a couple injuries over the past two seasons, typical or otherwise. Still, he is throwing about as hard as he was a couple years ago, walking fewer batters, and actually striking out more too. To date this season, his 9.3 K9 would be the third highest rate of his career. His 2.0 BB9 represents a rate below his career average. 

With solid, if not spectacular, peripherals, the Giants have a trade chip whose ERA (4.02) and FIP (3.96) align closely, suggesting Madison’s performance has been generally warranted. Until recently though, he had for stretches been able to outperform his traditional FIP; from 2016-18 his ERA sat below his FIP at least a half-run each season. Whether that is due to his poise, park effects, luck, or strong defense is a discussion for another time. 

His home runs allowed have spiked over recent years though, but so too have home runs jumped for most pitchers.

He averages more than 6 innings per start, pitching depth league-wide is brutally shallow, and there is always the allure of “Madison Bumgarner, the Playoffs Hero”; it makes sense that teams would line up to make bids.

So today’s iteration of Bumgarner appears to be more in the vein of an innings eater whose reputation suggests that he could turn the switch in the event that he finds himself playing for a contender (because “Playoff Hero”, you know?). 

The Cubs made a gamble last season for another former WS MVP whose home run rate was swelling, Cole Hamels. Theo Epstein’s comments at the time of that trade are telling: “He’s been through the wars and is the type of guy that could get rejuvenated, coming from the situation he’s in now, into a pennant race and this clubhouse and Wrigley Field. Really betting on the person.” While the Cubs didn’t get as far as they would have liked, Hamels in fact appeared rejuvenated and was a foundational piece for them down the stretch.

But while Hamels’ issues last year were more obvious (too many walks, too many bombs), some of Bumgarner’s warning signs might be a bit more implicit. Specifically, some of those issues can be readily observed in the third tab of Fangraph’s pitching leaderboard, in batted ball leaders.

While his peripherals and cumulative FIP look pretty solid, Bumgarner has not induced the type of contact he might hope for. The chart below lists where he ranks in relation to the 78 qualifying starters in a handful of batted ball statistics. 

As the chart above indicates, Bumgarner’s offerings give way to disproportionately large numbers of hard hit balls, line drives, and a correspondingly low total of soft contact. He is a flyable pitcher, with a well above average FB% and GB/FB% to go along with that rate. 

Here is another chart featuring actual percentages, opposed to rankings, for those same statistics. Now Bumgarner is explicitly juxtaposed to the average rates of 2019’s qualifying cohort.

What sticks out here, in my opinion, is not that Bumgarner lies on the wrong side of the average in just about all cases, but that his BABIP and HR/FB% are roughly cohort-average despite the type of contact he’s giving up. 

He might be the beneficiary of strong defense, but possibly more concerning from a buyer standpoint is the nature of the ballpark he plays in, and the fact that it lies at ocean (Bay) level. Indeed, Bumgarner’s OPS against is .678 at home and .808 on the road. Park factors play a part then in the calculus of a potential buyer weighing their options. 

MLBTR cited the Twins’ potential interest in Bumgarner. FanGraphs though, most recently rated the Twins’ ballpark as being slightly above average for allowing home runs, at 102 (this number is normalized around 100). The Giants’ home, Oracle Park, rates as just 84, suggesting that it does a considerable job suppressing home runs. Given his other batted ball statistics, it is conceivable that Bumgarner’s HR/FB% would experience a bump should he call another park home for a few months. 

So that’s the gist. In acquiring Bumgarner, a team is acquiring all his iterations and reputations and the history that he has built for himself. They are acquiring a pitcher who is more prepared than most to focus and compete and give his team’s bullpen a rest. But he hasn’t been able to outperform his peripherals as he has in the past, and his batted ball statistics indicate that those peripherals might be trending the wrong way still. 

There is another quote from Theo Epstein from the time of the Cole Hamels Trade last summer that I think is apt here. This is it: “Home-road splits in terms of analysis only go so far… You’re taking what is already a small sample, a partial season, and dicing it into even smaller parts, so you can really get out of control crafting your own narrative. … More than anything, it’s trusting Cole Hamels for who he is.” 

Epstein is very basically rejecting the exact type of analysis and conjecture that I have engaged in here. That is well worth noting. That said, so too are any and all numerical considerations when searching for the potential missing piece for a title run.