Frustrated Torey Lovullo Speaks About Madison Bumgarner
Earlier today we reported on yet another poor outing from Madison Bumgarner. The Box Score is not for the faint of heart. He allowed seven runs in just three innings, putting his team in a hole from which they could not recover, resulting in a 14-5 loss to the Cardinals. The frustration and disappointment with Bumgarner's outings has been building for some time, really since May 21st of last year. Since that date, in 26 starts Bumgarner has a 5-16 record with a 6.17 ERA. No amount of analysis or parsing of data or underlying peripherals can make it look better unfortunately. An obviously frustrated Torey Lovullo addressed the media after today's game to discuss the situation and his rotation spot. Here is a transcript of that press conference Q&A
How difficult is it watching Bumgarner?
"It’s very tough. The empathetic side of me hurts for him. I want every pitcher to do well and I know how hard he’s working. He’s just grinding. And then the other side of me is just extremely frustrated. I want to see everybody do well and help us win baseball games."
Is fastball velocity part of the issue?
"I’m going to trust the readings; we were all watching the same readings, maybe it was a little hot …I’m just going to look at the results and they unfortunately weren’t great. I think there was some misses, he pitched at certain times to certain batters. But I think overall it wasn’t a pristine outing for him."
It's worth noting that Bumgarner averaged just 89.3 MPH on his four seam fastball today, down slightly from his previous three games average of 89.6 MPH. Last year he averaged 91.2 MPH and during his peak with the Giants he averaged 92.7 MPH
Where do you go from here?
"I don’t know. As we do with every situation after every start we group up as a staff and sit down with the front office and figure out what to do next, and that’s what we’re going to end up doing, I’m sure."
Are you confident Bumgarner will make his next start?
"Like I said, we’ve got to talk it over, we’ll sit down and see what’s going to give us the best option in five days. We do the same thing after every start and we’ll do that again."
One potential replacement, left-hander Tommy Henry, pitched for Reno yesterday. He went six innings, and giving up two runs on 4 hits , no walks, and six strikeouts.
Willson Contreras incident
During the game there was an incident where apparently Bumgarner was unhappy with Willson Contreras, who had a very hot series, going 6-12 with three doubles, two homers, and five RBI. He said something to Contreras after a particularly aggressive swing Willson Contreras seemed to bark back expletives in telling Bumgarner to shut up and had to be restrained by Jose Herrera. Asked after the game Lovullo seemed to allude to some issues with Contreras but was not specific.
"Not much, [to say] They’re both competitors. Contreras plays the way he does. And when you feel a certain way about his style inside of this clubhouse and he does what he does you gotta accept it. I don’t know what happened or what was said."
We here at Inside the Diamondbacks have been asking how many more starts Bumgarner will get before the team makes a change in the rotation. There does not seem to be any way to reverse the degradation in his stuff and it's difficult to see a path to improvement for Bumgarner. While we certainly share Lovullo's empathetic mind set from a human standpoint, father time is undefeated. We will continue to ask the tough questions about the tough problems.
