D-Backs’ Bumgarner hopes normal spring yields good results,
Lefty hopes preparation will set up a great season
When Diamondbacks left-hander Madison Bumgarner thinks back to the way he handled last year — from the sudden end of spring training through the quarantine period and into the start of summer camp — there is one thing he would change. He wonders if it would have made a difference in the way his year unfolded.
“The only thing I wish I would have done different last year was kept (my throwing) at a steady pace instead of getting way up here and then dropping back down and then way up,” Bumgarner said. “We didn’t really know what to plan for. I was trying to take it days and weeks at a time instead of staying somewhere in the middle. I think that would have been more beneficial.”
Bumgarner is coming off the worst season of his career and his first with the Diamondbacks, who gave him a five-year, $85 million deal last winter. In nine starts, he had a 6.48 ERA. He won just one game and did not complete six innings in any start.
But in speaking with reporters following his first day of spring training on Wednesday at Salt River Fields, Bumgarner seemed to be at peace with all that transpired. He seemed able to process the down year, take it for what it was worth — given the circumstances — and appeared ready to move forward.
Take his answer to a question about whether he felt motivated to prove that last year isn’t who he is.
“Well, I know that it’s not,” he said. “So I don’t feel like I necessarily have anything to prove.
Part of that confidence, perhaps, stems from the way he finished last season. After an outing that ranked among the worst of his career on Sept. 15 in Anaheim, Bumgarner proceeded to throw well in his final two starts, tossing five scoreless innings in each.
For one, his velocity finally began to tick up. It was not back to the levels of previous years or even where it had been during spring training, but it was at least moving in the right direction. Bumgarner seems to think the more important development was a change in the way he attacked hitters, something he described as trying to “keep it simple more than anything.”
Pitching coach Matt Herges talked last season about the adjustment, which essentially amounted to giving Bumgarner less information in the form of scouting reports and allowing him to get back to his old self.
“Bum just finally said, ‘You know what, I’m going to pitch my game around the scouting report,’” Herges said in September. “‘I know what it is. My catcher knows what it is, but if there’s something I feel’ — because no one else can feel what he’s feeling — ‘I’m going to go ahead.’ We said, ‘Yes, absolutely, that’s what you need to do.’ That was basically the change. It was more of a mind-set thing.”
Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo said: “We feel like there’s always a learning process with every new player that comes on board. We know that he’s had a lot of success and we don’t want to interrupt the normal game-planning that he does. We felt like there was a blend and a better understanding of what was needed (in a scouting report) and I think it translated over the last couple of starts.”
Bumgarner said he threw his first bullpen session of the year on Wednesday. He called it “pretty good for the first one.”
He is hopeful he can build into shape the way he did for each of his previous 11 major league seasons prior to this last one — that is, without having a threemonth shutdown between camp and the season.
He suspects last year would have been different otherwise.
“Obviously, you look at the kind of year I had and I want to say that it drastically or dramatically affected myself,” Bumgarner said. “I don’t know; there were so many variables. That was definitely a bigger one.”