How Madison Bumgarner Plans to Provide Encore to Immortal Postseason

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — Confess: You probably thought Madison Bumgarner's arm would be powder by now.

Unless you live and breathe San Francisco Giants baseball, you probably spent the winter bragging to friends about Bumgarner's 270 innings pitched last season, including a previously unseen 52.2 in October.

How in the world can a guy come back strong the next season from that?

Well, believe all of this modern pitch-count, bubble-wrap, porcelain-doll-pitcher stuff if you want.

Bumgarner? He snorts like one of the beloved horses on his ranch back home in North Carolina, and when he does, man, is it ever easy to envision the Giants riding him through the heat of another summer.

"I feel great," he says. "Everything's been good."

Some folks looked at his 8.64 spring ERA after four starts and figured, uh-huh, there's a red flag.

Then he went out Sunday and pretty much wrapped the Angels' bats around their necks, allowing only one hit and one run in six innings.

"I feel like my secondary pitches are better than they usually are at this time," he says.

The sweeping curve, the cutter, the precision changeup, the beard, the laconic drawl…everything is in place for Bumgarner's encore following one of the finest World Series performances in history. So no, don't listen to the doubters.

He is 6'5", 235 pounds, still only 25 and country strong.

"I'm going to be honest with you," fellow starter and good friend Tim Hudson says. "It's almost like the season never ended for him. He looks as good as he did last year."

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"You have to be mindful of your body," starter Jake Peavy says. "But it's not like 270 innings pitched is something the human body has never done."

Including the postseason, Bumgarner's 39 starts were the most by any Giants pitcher since Ron Bryant had the same workload in 1973. His strikeouts-per-nine innings ratio of 9.1 and walks-per-nine ratio of 1.8 were career bests.

And then, October. In seven postseason games, he was 4-1 with a 1.03 ERA and, as you might recall, one magnificent save. There was the five-inning save in Game 7 against the Royals and the 0.43 ERA in the World Series. His 0.25 ERA through three World Series' stands as the best in history of any pitcher with a minimum of 20 innings pitched.

For 2015, here's the intriguing news: After a season that lasted an extra month, Bumgarner says the offseason did not seem especially short to him.

"It really didn't to me," he says, comfortably seated at a table in the middle of the Giants clubhouse, the new season close enough to reach out and touch with one of those long arms of his.

"I don't count the days when I get home. I just go home and take usually a month off from my workouts, from running and throwing and all of that, and I'll get back into working out and running and then start throwing again a little bit later, usually around New Year's.

"I just take it day by day, and when it's time to come back here it's time to come back. People talk about it being a shorter offseason, but I really don't pay attention to it. It just seems like a normal offseason.

"We get plenty of time to go home and relax."

He appeared on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon a few days after the World Series—actress Anne Hathaway and rocker Stevie Nicks were the other guests ("They were awesome," he says)—lugging the championship trophy and gifting Fallon a pair of MadBum underwear.

Sports Illustrated named him Sportsman of the Year. He took his family on a short vacation in December, to Las Vegas for the National Finals Rodeo.

Otherwise, he did what he always does: Spent most of his time on the land he treasures at home near Lenoir, North Carolina.

With his emergence as an October superhero, so too has the folklore grown surrounding his country-boy ways. He owns roughly 20 horses and 60 cows. ("Pretty close to that," he says. "It changes a lot, but it's pretty close"), and if you believe the not-so-urban legends, when he's not riding his horses in the offseason, he's mending his fences ("Allegedly," he says, chuckling. "Allegedly. That's what they say. I don't know.")

At any rate, it didn't take long for the October goosebumps to dissipate amid the pine trees and mountain air.

"The way I go about it, I try to ignore all of that adrenalin," Bumgarner says. "I try to be the same way out there pitching that I am talking to you right now. So I don't know that there ever was a whole lot of adrenalin.

"I feel like I try so hard to keep that out so I can concentrate on what I need to do, instead of getting all amped up. The more you try to do it, the better you're going to get at it. I've been trying to work on that forever. I feel like I did a good job with that.

David J. Phillip/Associated Press

"I was more mentally tired than anything. Every game is life and death almost."

What is easy to overlook when measured against Bumgarner's slow drawl and even-keel persona is a competitive zeal that Hudson says burns as fiercely as "anybody I've ever played with, and I've played with some of the best ever."

Yes, Bumgarner is incredibly talented. No, he does not get by on just that alone.

In a different way, Hudson says, Bumgarner is every bit as competitive as John Smoltz, whose competitiveness was legendary from the baseball field to the pregame backgammon tournaments in the Braves clubhouse to the golf course.

"Two totally different people coming from two totally different walks of life," Hudson says. "But competitive fire speaks different languages and exhibits itself in different lifestyles."

Hudson pauses, then smiles, the idea of Bumgarner vs. Smoltz taking root.

"Bum's focus is a bit more narrow," Hudson says, chuckling. "But when it comes to country redneck games, he's as good as it gets. Stuff like lawnmower races and toilet seat tosses. I haven't seen him, but he's told me about it.

"Smoltzy was good at the country club games."

Bumgarner? He's the kind of guy who accidentally steps on a rattlesnake in spring training, then reflexively chops it into three pieces with an ax…then discovers a live rabbit in the snake's belly. This really happened last year, an anecdote that was recounted nicely in the SI Sportsman of the Year story.

Michael Loccisano/Getty Images

"I have no idea why the ax was laying there," Bumgarner tells me. "My wife (high school sweetheart Ali) likes to dissect everything, so she saw something, we didn't know what it was, and it ended up being three rabbits."

One of them was breathing, so Ali took it inside and nursed it back to health for a week and then turned it over to a wildlife refuge, which released the rabbit back into the wild.

No wonder Bumgarner emerged from last year so strong that he did not even feel the need to tweak his winter workout routine. It's who he is.

"I'm always trying to listen to my body and adjust to what it's telling me," he says. "I feel like I work pretty hard and I can listen to my body and make adjustments. But really, I didn't feel any need to make adjustments.

"I felt great the whole year last year, and all through the postseason. And I felt great when I was home. We've been through a big innings jump before, not that many, but a jump. I try and take good care of myself. I know there are some things there are just no avoiding, injuries that guys have, but I feel great and I haven't changed anything."

Most significant, Bumgarner's workload increased from 131.1 innings pitched in 2009 combined at Class A San Jose, Class AA Connecticut and in San Francisco, to 213.4 innings pitched (including the postseason) during the Giants' run to the 2010 World Series title.

Then he increased to 204.2 innings pitched in 2011, and he has not worked fewer than 200 innings since.

Nor does he plan to lighten his load in 2015.

"The most important number to me is innings," Bumgarner says. "I feel like if you're throwing lot of innings, the other stuff will take care of itself. [But] it's all important. I don't want to put more stock in one number than another.

"At the end of the year, I look at the traditional numbers just to see where everything is at. I don't know what all the new stuff means. But if you're out there getting a lot of innings, chances are you're going to have pretty good numbers."

So here he is, ready to pick up exactly where he left off in 2014, which, in case you don't recall, was retiring Kansas City's Salvador Perez with a high fastball in Game 7 of the World Series with the tying run on third base.

Not for a minute does he question the soundness of his arm, his mind or anything else in coming off the greatest October ever. And not for a minute does he consider changing a thing.

Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images

"Everything's the same," he says.

Up to, and including, the fact that he has had zero conversations with pitching coach Dave Righetti or manager Bruce Bochy about monitoring his innings this year, especially early, after last season's workload.

"There hasn't been any talk that I know about," Bumgarner says. "I wouldn't want there to be."

"If there was something that needs to be [discussed], yeah, I would make those adjustments. But I don't feel that there is."

Except for, perhaps, one tiny thing: This spring has been a little more, shall we say, uneventful, compared to last spring around the Bumgarner's rented spring house.

"Nothing anywhere close to it," he says, smiling. "And hopefully not, either.

"I don't want to be stepping on any snakes."

You have to believe the Giants would prefer it that way.

But you also have to believe that they're secure in knowing that, be it a snake or an opposing hitter with a World Series title on the line in October, this is a man who can chop his way out of trouble, pronto.

Scott Miller covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

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