Frustration and resistance to change: Behind the scenes of Madison Bumgarner's struggles with the Diamondbacks (2024)

If Madison Bumgarner was trying to be discreet, it didn’t work.

It was May 2021, and the left-hander was in his second year of a five-year and $85 million contract with the Diamondbacks. The first year, in which he’d posted a 6.48 ERA in nine starts, had gone terribly, but he’d now strung together several terrific starts, including a seven-inning no-hitter. Could he point to a significant change?

“I definitely can,” Bumgarner said, “but I’m not going to throw anybody under the bus.” Pressed for specifics, he allowed that ditching the team-provided scouting report was “a big part of it.” It was an oddly cryptic answer, but it was hardly indecipherable. Most took the response to be a shot at the person who prepares attack plans for Arizona’s starters — pitching strategist and former big-league pitcher Dan Haren.

Haren confronted Bumgarner about the comment soon after, according to sources within the organization. That ended whatever relationship the pair had, and sources say the two didn’t speak to each other for the rest of Bumgarner’s time with the team, a span of almost two years. From then on, even as Haren worked closely with the team’s other starters, all game-planning information for Bumgarner was run through the Diamondbacks’ catchers.

That run of good starts did not last. Bumgarner finished that year and the next with ERAs over 4.50, and then posted a 10.26 mark through his first four starts of this season. Arizona didn’t give him a fifth. Despite owing him $34 million through next year, the Diamondbacks released him, bringing an end to what had been a surprisingly frustrating marriage. After starring with the San Francisco Giants, the veteran had declined steeply, leaving everyone searching for answers as to what had gone wrong.

“We’ve all lost a lot of sleep over trying to answer that question,” general manager Mike Hazen said last month after announcing the move, and no simple answer has presented itself since Bumgarner was cut loose. What has emerged instead — through conversations with multiple people within the organization, many of whom were granted anonymity so they could speak candidly — is a complex picture of a headstrong former star struggling to confront the reality of his own decline.

Bumgarner, several sources said, had trouble accepting that he wasn’t the pitcher he used to be and was resistant to trying new things. The break with Haren was emblematic of the larger issue. Bumgarner, who did not return a request for comment made through his representative, wanted to do things his way, the same way he’d always done them. Haren, and others in the organization, felt he needed to do things differently in order to keep pace with a changing game and his own aging body. The lefty could be distrustful of those tasked with helping him, a problem that sometimes was exacerbated when those very same people expressed their frustrations about him.

“A lot of times, highly successful people are resistant to change, and this was a highly successful guy,” Arizona pitching coach Brent Strom told reporters earlier this month. “Perhaps the changes I tried to make and introduce and this and that, it just didn’t take. We had an amicable divorce.”

It was a marriage that might have been doomed to fail, with the former star pitcher steeling himself against the suggestions that many with the Diamondbacks felt were necessary to maintain his effectiveness. Eventually, after years of trying to return the left-hander to even a shadow of the standout pitcher he was as a Giant, Arizona threw up its hands and decided to let Bumgarner sink or swim on his own.

Ultimately, he sank.

In December of 2019, when the Diamondbacks signed Bumgarner to what was then the second-biggest free-agent deal in team history, the contract raised eyebrows.

The left-hander was only 30 years old, but he’d logged a ton of miles on his left arm. His already meager fastball velocity, which even in his prime never averaged as high as 93 mph, had begun to dip. But the Diamondbacks were coming off a surprise 85-win season and felt poised to compete, and Bumgarner was one of several players acquired that offseason that the team hoped would lead it back to the playoffs.

Things, however, got off to a rough start. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic halted the sport for months and, with Bumgarner’s tendency to drop off the grid when not in season, halted the team’s communication with its new star pitcher. The Diamondbacks did communicate, however, that all pitchers were expected to work out on their own and be ready to pick things back up on short notice. Yet when Bumgarner arrived for a three-week “summer camp,” he was out of shape and apparently had not touched a baseball during the shutdown. The result was a disappointing 2020 season with a 6.48 ERA in nine starts. Bumgarner’s fastball velocity averaged a career-worst 88.4 mph.

He was better in 2021 — a 1.4-win pitcher, per Baseball-Reference, his only season as a net-positive player in Arizona — but the Diamondbacks were abysmal. Pitching coach Matt Herges, who’d known Bumgarner when both were in San Francisco, was reassigned to another role in player development. Stepping into Herges’ job was Strom, the analytically inclined coach who’d helped turn the Astros into a juggernaut. That spring, Bumgarner signaled his admiration for the storied coach, calling Strom “probably the first mixture I’ve seen of the old school and new school.” Strom came in with ideas for how to fix Bumgarner — “There are certain things that may enhance the life of his fastball,” the coach said at the time — but instead found a pupil hesitant to break away from what had always worked in the past.

There were mechanical suggestions. Bumgarner used to face the hitter head-on but had altered his delivery over the years to stand more perpendicular to the plate, which made his arm late. Switching back, some on the coaching staff believed, would help his lagging command. A more recent attempted fix was to reposition Bumgarner to the third-base side of the rubber. Bumgarner was game to try many of these new things, and was just as bothered by his poor performance as anyone else, but people within the organization say he was often too impatient to let those changes work.

More contentious than mechanics was the issue of Bumgarner’s pitch mix. Throughout his exemplary time in San Francisco, Bumgarner mowed down hitters primarily with his four-seam fastball and his cutter. But as his velocity and command began to dip, Strom and the organization pushed Bumgarner to use the cutter far less and boost the usage of his curveball and changeup. Bumgarner, who sources say became obsessed with regaining his fastball velocity rather than adapt to the pitcher he was in the present, remained unconvinced.

He did dial back his four-seam usage a bit and slightly upped the use of the two secondaries. But he threw his cutter just as often as a Diamondback — about 35 percent of the time — as he had as a Giant. In his four starts with Arizona this season, opponents batted .375 against it. At several points, including at the end, the left-hander was so adamant that he should pitch how he always had that the team decided it was best to leave the veteran to his own devices.

“We tried to do it mechanically. That didn’t work out,” Strom said. “Then we tried to do it with pitch selection, identifying which pitches were the best for him to throw, and we just couldn’t get off the mark.”

Underneath the disagreements about mechanics and pitch usage, sources say, was the core issue: a lack of trust.

Pitching for the most part as he always had last season, Bumgarner continued to struggle, posting a 4.88 ERA. Privately, and sometimes indiscreetly, Diamondbacks staffers would express their frustration with his intransigence. Occasionally, that frustration made its way back to Bumgarner, sources said, which only hardened his resolve and damaged whatever trust he had in those around him.

Bumgarner’s break with Haren was spurred in part by Bumgarner’s general distaste for scouting reports. The lefty famously likes to pitch off feel and read the swings of opposing hitters, an approach that worked well enough when his stuff was sharp and he was at the height of his powers. However, Haren and Diamondbacks provide detailed pitching game plans for the team’s starters, and Bumgarner never bought into using those reports.

Strom is just as big a fan of information, but his relationship with Bumgarner became strained last summer, midway through the coach’s first season with the club. During a road series in July, multiple sources said, Bumgarner caught wind of Strom’s frustration with the veteran pitcher. The two were said to have hashed it out, but Bumgarner’s trust in the coach was damaged, multiple sources say. Others in the organization think the relationship would have had a chance to work if the coaching staff had sometimes taken a gentler approach with Bumgarner, who often expressed that alterations were being forced down his throat.

Bumgarner wanted to pitch in a way that was comfortable for him, and the frequent suggestion that he couldn’t anymore soured him on some in the team’s brain trust. The frustration ran both ways. At one point, two sources said, Strom expressed a concern that Bumgarner might be setting a negative example for the team’s young pitchers, although the coach ultimately decided there was little danger of that happening. And Bumgarner’s tenure was not one defined solely by rancor and disagreement. Others in the organization, including on the coaching staff, defend him. Bumgarner could frustrate coaches and analysts, but he was not unliked among the players. After Bumgarner was released, one player said, others in the clubhouse missed having him around.

Speaking to reporters earlier this month, Strom acknowledged disagreements between him and the left-hander, but has expressed his admiration for Bumgarner’s accomplishments. “I have a great deal of respect for this guy and what he did,” the coach said. Nor does he think Bumgarner is washed up.

“He’s still a young man who has the ability,” Strom said. “I do think that some tweaks could probably help.”

Speaking on the day after he cut bait on the biggest free-agent signing of his tenure, Hazen downplayed the suggestion of discord between Bumgarner and the coaching staff. “I don’t think that that was a major piece to what’s happened here,” the GM said. Bumgarner had “been an elite competitor in this league for a long time” and “knows what he needs to do to get himself ready.” Hazen also added that Bumgarner had arrived at spring training “in the best shape he’s ever been in.”

It’s true that Bumgarner showed up for camp looking noticeably trim. It’s also true that, despite their frustrations with him, many with the Diamondbacks have nothing but positive things to say about Bumgarner’s competitiveness. He may have been reluctant and even recalcitrant to adopt the changes that very well may have kept his career on track, but he always battled his butt off on the mound. Nor did he take his lack of performance lightly.

Even if Bumgarner had gleefully adopted every tweak as a Diamondback and overhauled himself as a pitcher, there’s no guarantee he would have pitched like the front-end starter Arizona hoped it had signed three and a half years ago. Even at the time, the signs of his decline were becoming apparent. The Diamondbacks have had some success coaxing rebounds out of pitchers and so has Strom, who’d been instrumental in revitalizing the careers of Gerrit Cole, Justin Verlander and others while in Houston. But those tricks don’t work 100 percent of the time. Sometimes, the cliff approaches quickly.

Bumgarner is now free to sign with any team for the major-league minimum salary of $720,000. Perhaps the team that takes a chance on him will find a veteran finally ready to try something different and stick with it. Perhaps the next team will try something new, although that would surprise many with the Diamondbacks, who feel that the team tried just about everything to get the 33-year-old on track.

But even though Hazen suggested there were no easy answers, and that he didn’t “regret signing the human,” the GM did say the decision-making that brought Bumgarner to the Diamondbacks had earned some scrutiny. “We need to have a better process around our evaluations,” Hazen said. “We need to have a better process of where things stand when we’re adding guys to our team.” The Diamondbacks, the answer implied, might have missed something.

When Hazen gave Bumgarner the news, he said, the conversation was respectful. Another source said that Bumgarner graciously wished everyone well on the way out the door. Both Bumgarner and the Diamondbacks wished it would have gone better.

They just never could agree on what that would have required.

(Top photo of Bumgarner: Thearon W. Henderson / Getty Images)