Thursday night, Giants ace Madison Bumgarner apparently wasn't a fan of Joe West's strike zone, because this happened after an uncharacteristic third walk of the game by last season's World Series MVP:
Looks like about 18 seconds there on the duel, give or take a few depending upon when we want to start or stop the clock. I'm generally not a fan of an umpire ripping off his mask to make himself the center of attention, but if they all led to stand-offs like this -- instead of screaming and ejections -- I'd be more on board. This is just outstanding entertainment between two strong personalities.
Not that Bumgarner wanted any part of discussing it post-game (via mercurynews.com):
“Joe was behind the plate?” he said. “I don’t pay attention to the umpires. I didn’t even realize he was back there.”
Classic.
The game was only the third in 31 starts where Bumgarner walked three.
As for the strike zone, the one in the video above looked like a ball, but obviously the frustration was stemming from pitches earlier in the game. Stuff like this builds in pitchers as the game progresses, as we all know.
Here was West's strike zone, via Brooks Baseball's excellent PITCHf/x graphs:
The red triangles are the pitches by the Giants that were called strikes while the green triangles are the pitches from the Giants that were called balls. The solid black box is the by-rule strikezone while the dashed lines are what the umpires generally call strikes. So look for green plots inside the box to find possible issues.
It does look like on the right-handed graph that we can find around seven balls that could have gone for strikes -- and two that definitely should have -- in the Giants' favor. I only see two green squares in the dashed area.
So, yeah, Bumgarner had a case.
Still, that pales in comparison to the epic staredown.
