Wednesday, March 03, 2010
Madison Bumgarner’s missing velocity
Posted by Harry PavlidisMadison Bumgarner worked in a Spring Training game for the Giants on Wednesday. He happened to be facing the Mariners in Peoria. Peoria happens to have PITCHf/x installed. This is the sixth game of Bumgarner's seen by PITCHf/x. Here's each game, the park, and his average fastball velocity (lumping four- and two-seam varieties together, using my own pitch classifications). And, yes, there were a few Spring Training games captured by PITCHf/x last year (all in Scottsdale, March 15-19, 2009).
I wouldn't expect to see him at top velocity already, but FYI dead-arm trackers (h/t JD Sussman):
03/17/2009 Scottsdale 93.4 mph 09/09/2009 San Francisco 88.7 09/19/2009 Los Angeles 91.8 09/22/2009 Phoenix 90.6 10/03/2009 San Diego 91.6 03/03/2010 Peoria, AZ 89.3
The Giants will be in Peoria two more times and Surprise twice (site of the other PITCHf/x installation) by March 15, with a split-squad pair at each park on the 15th. Hopefully we'll catch some more data on Bumgarner. Until then, the worriers can worry.
Harry Pavlidis admits he has a baseball problem. He is the founder of Pitch Info LLC, His pitch classifications power the player cards at Brooksbaseball.net. Feedback, questions and comments are appreciated - Email harrypav@gmail.com and Twitter @harrypav
According to Giants beat writer Andrew Baggarly, Mad Bum was hitting 86-89 on the scouts’ guns today. Not bad for this early in the spring, although Tim Lincecum was said to be in the 91-93 range.
Bumgarner said he lost the velocity by throwing too much between starts in the minors. He said that when he was called up in September, he was surprised a how little the Giants’ starters threw between starts.
Will Madison regain his lost velocity? I don’t think today’s outing provided great hope, but it is still quite early. And Mad Bum did get all but two hitters out in his two innings, even though he was working a lot on his slider and change up and left at least one of each up in the zone.
It appears to me that even without the velocity Bumgarner will be an average big league starter. If he regains it, he could have ace potential.
Bumgarner’s strengths have been his outstanding control for a young southpaw, his motion being hard to pick up, his high level of poise and competitiveness for a 20-year-old, and and an outstanding pickoff move.
His weaknesses are inconsistency with his two secondary pitches and perhaps the velocity on his fastball.
The good news appears to be that the effective speed of his fastball to the batter is higher than its actual velocity.
And last spring Mad Bum struck out Juan Pierre on a slider and Manny Ramirez on a change up. Although his minor league strikeout rate tailed off along with his fastball speed, he did strike out a batter per innings in his 10 frames with the Giants in September. Many of those strikeouts were called, and many came on the slider and change up.