The 2023 baseball season is almost over, and with it almost assuredly so are the careers of two of the best pitchers of the 2010s. Madison Bumgarner may well win a World Series ring for this season, but it would be for a team that released him six months ago. He has not latched on with another team since. Stephen Strasburg, meanwhile, was set to announce his retirement and then did not, but he has not pitched at all this season and it seems unlikely that he ever will again. Now is an opportune time to compare two careers that seem to me to be unusually closely matched.
Madison Bumgarner has meant more to me than any ballplayer of my lifetime, save Buster Posey and Matt Cain. He dominated the Texas Rangers in the World Series on my sixteenth birthday and his team won him his first championship the next day. He then won two more, the latter being as close as baseball gets to a single-handed effort. To me he was the closest thing to Bob Gibson in our time. Stephen Strasburg’s career I know less intimately because he never played for my favorite team, but I followed his ascent like every baseball fan and then spent much of his career living less than ten miles from his ballpark. I have plenty of friends to whom Strasburg might mean something like what Bumgarner means to me.
Strasburg and Bumgarner were born a year apart. Prior to the 2010 season, Baseball America ranked them the top two pitching prospects in the National League. Both entered a major league starting rotation in June 2010. In Strasburg’s debut for Washington, he struck out fourteen batters on national television. Bumgarner’s first start after replacing Joe Martinez in the San Francisco pitching rotation was less auspicious, but he too was excellent as a rookie. Both Bumgarner and Strasburg were regular starters for four postseason teams. They were probably the two best postseason pitchers of their time: since they made their debuts, they are the only two pitchers to have won a World Series MVP award. Neither was ever at all effective again after the 2019 season, so we can place neat dates around the productive portion of their careers: 2010 to 2019.
There are two obvious stories to tell with Strasburg and Bumgarner. The first is what they gave their teams. We can see their career statistics through 2019:
Strasburg: 239 starts, 112–58, 1438⅔ IP, 3.17 ERA, 130 ERA+, 31.4 rWAR, 36.6 fWAR
Bumgarner: 286 starts, 119–92, 1846 IP, 3.13 ERA, 120 ERA+, 32.9 rWAR, 31.5 fWAR
Strasburg, however, tore his UCL and missed a full year of play early in his career. If we limit our range to the years 2012 to 2019, after Strasburg’s recovery, we have the following numbers:
Strasburg: 222 starts, 106–54, 1346⅔ IP, 3.21 ERA, 128 ERA+, 30.5 rWAR, 34.7 fWAR
Bumgarner: 234 starts, 99–73, 1520⅓ IP, 3.14 ERA, 121 ERA+, 32.7 rWAR, 30.2 fWAR
Throughout their careers, Strasburg was seen as a better pitcher than Bumgarner. When he was on the mound, Strasburg’s performance was clearly superior. In spite of that, the Giants got roughly as much production from Bumgarner as the Nationals did to Strasburg: in an eight-year span, Bumgarner managed nearly an extra season’s worth of innings pitched.
The percentage of innings pitched by starting pitchers has fallen off a cliff since 2015, which has made baseball substantially worse for fans. Top pitchers throw fewer innings than ever before. In part this is founded on the belief that relievers are more effective than starting pitchers facing batters for the third time in a game, but in part it is based on the idea that limiting pitchers’ workloads reduces their likelihood of injury. Strasburg was the poster boy for that phenomenon: after he came back from his UCL injury, the Washington Nationals very publicly decided that his season would be limited, eventually settling on his pitching no more than 160 innings. He hit 159 on September 7 and never pitched again for the rest of the year; his team was eliminated from the postseason in five games while he watched. I thought at the time that this was a disgrace.
The Giants, by contrast, were perhaps the last organization in baseball to let their young pitchers throw as many innings as they could. Matt Cain pitched 200 innings as a 22-year-old in 2007, Tim Lincecum pitched 227 innings as a 24-year-old in 2008, and Madison Bumgarner pitched 204⅔ innings as a 21-year-old in 2011. By the time Bumgarner was through his age-24 season, he had logged a total of 1,041 innings in his major-league career with the regular season and playoffs put together. The Giants let Bumgarner pitch through his suffering and then recovering from a mysterious dead arm in 2009, and they let him pitch even where other organizations would have worried about ill effects.
On August 20, 2012, after getting through seven innings on 104 pitches at Dodger Stadium, Bumgarner hit for himself in the top of the eighth with the hope that he could record his second consecutive complete game. It took Bumgarner 19 pitches to get through the bottom of the eighth, and he did not come out for the ninth inning. At the end of that start, Bumgarner’s ERA for the season was 2.83. In his last ten starts of the year, spanning the remainder of the regular season and the postseason, his ERA was 5.92. While Strasburg did not pitch in the 2012 postseason, the Giants won the World Series that year mostly in spite of Bumgarner. A different organization might have taken the message that his workload needed to be reduced, but Bumgarner logged 200 innings again the next year and then finished in the top three in the National League in innings pitched each of the three years after that.
Even though he lasted a little more than three years after, Bumgarner was done as a major-league starting pitcher after the 2019 season, when he was 29. Before him, teammates Matt Cain and Tim Lincecum had each had their last good season at age 27. This might mean that they were overused and that the Giants ruined them by letting them pitch so much. Yet Stephen Strasburg, too, was done after 2019, in spite of his being handled with exceptional care.
There are two possible ways to interpret the careers of Strasburg and Bumgarner ending at about the same time. The first is to say that Strasburg was more fragile than Bumgarner, and only by handling him with great care were the Nationals able to get a career of this length out of him. (The possible corollary here is that the Giants, had they handled Bumgarner the way the Nationals handled Strasburg, could have kept him effective for longer.) The second is that all the effort to reduce Strasburg’s workload was basically pointless, since he didn’t last any longer than Bumgarner even though the Giants did nothing of the sort with Bumgarner. I don’t know what the answer is, but I know that as a Giants fan I loved to see Bumgarner take the mound every fifth day and I loved seeing him pitch very deep into games and my experience would have been worse if he hadn’t pitched so much.
The second story, after inquiring into what Strasburg and Bumgarner did for their teams, is to ask what the two pitchers got out of it themselves. In Strasburg’s case, the answer is a whole lot. After the 2019 season, he signed a $245 million contract, and he has not yet formally retired because he still has $150 million of that contract coming to him. Spotrac estimates that his total earnings will come out to a little over $350 million. Madison Bumgarner will also be paid not to pitch over the coming years, but he has only $29 million outstanding: when he was a free agent after the 2019 season just like Strasburg, he was only able to get $85 million. Bumgarner may have three (and possibly even four) World Series rings to Strasburg’s one, but he will end up with less than half of Strasburg’s career earnings.
There are a number of reasons that Strasburg’s contract was larger than Bumgarner’s—Strasburg had a strong 2019 that temporarily assuaged durability concerns followed by an outstanding postseason, Bumgarner’s velocity had suffered a concerning drop, and durability issues with Strasburg might have been seen to matter less with starting pitchers throwing fewer and fewer innings—but it does seem strange that Strasburg got a contract so much larger than Bumgarner’s when the two pitchers provided roughly equivalent value both before and after the signing of their contracts. After Bumgarner left San Francisco to sign with the Diamondbacks, it came out that his relationship with the Giants had permanently soured after the team gave him an insultingly low offer in contract negotiations two years prior. Strasburg, as best as I can tell, never had to be insulted by a monetary offer from a team.
The difference is that Strasburg’s agent was Scott Boras and Bumgarner’s was not. When Washington shut down Strasburg before the end of the 2012 season, the team appeared to be acting in Strasburg’s interests rather than its own. When Strasburg became a free agent, the Nationals paid his market value to bring him back. Bumgarner’s career never seemed to have the same dynamic: his own interests seemed to always be subordinate to those of the team. Perhaps this is the real story here: a contrast between one man who was able to get what he wanted for himself and one who was not. Madison Bumgarner is a champion many times over, but who knows what else he could have had?
Naveed Chowdhury 