Baseball records only two pitchers who have ever had a month like that even in the regular season: Jim Shaw in September 1914 and Billy Pierce in August 1953. Nobody ever did all that before in October. In the heat of the postseason, Bumgarner struck out 45 batters, threw two shutouts and saved a game while posting a 1.03 ERA. On the memory of October alone he forever will be linked with 2014, the way Christy Mathewson is with 1905, Carl Hubbell with 1933 and as Sandy Koufax (1965), Orel Hershiser (1988), and Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling (2001) are with the years they were named SI Sportsmen.
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In 36 career World Series innings, Bumgarner is 4-0 and holds alltime records for lowest ERA (0.25), fewest hits per nine innings (3.5) and fewest walks plus hits per inning (0.53).īumgarner pitched 40 times and threw 270 innings in 2014, including a record 522/3 innings just in the postseason. What sets Bumgarner apart from all others, regardless of age or era, is his pitching in the World Series. His career, as spectacularly as it shines today, began as does most everything else with Bumgarner: humbly, and with home in his heart.īumgarner has won three world championships through age 25, joining Vida Blue as the only pitchers to accomplish that at such a young age. Instructional League lasted only about a month. Bumgarner would bring a lasso and practice his roping against the inanimate animal, pretending he was home.
In a courtyard there was a statue of a bull. But he got over it pretty quick."īumgarner would pass the downtime by walking from his room at a Days Inn to the Scottsdale Fashion Square mall. I told him he had to stick it out and be tough. He missed Lenoir so much that he would stand on the field during practice and look at the airplanes overhead, and if he noticed one from Southwest Airlines-the carrier he knew serviced the direct route from Phoenix to Raleigh-he imagined himself sitting in one of its seats, happy to be going home for good. The secret he can tell now is this: After hardly a week there, he called San Francisco assistant general manager Bobby Evans, then the director of player personnel, and told him he wanted to quit baseball. The Giants, after selecting him 10th overall in the 2007 draft, assigned him to their Instructional League team in Scottsdale, Ariz. To be one required something Bumgarner was not ready for: leaving Lenoir (pronounced la-NORE).
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That is, until he became a professional baseball player. Life in No'th Ca'lina was all Bumgarner knew and wanted. "He taught me everything I know about that," he says.
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"Because they're trying to run away from the wind."Ībernathy showed Bumgarner how to hunt and fish. "Look, Paw-Paw," he said to his maternal grandfather, Lewis Abernathy, "those leaves are afraid." He is the third-youngest baseball player to be so honored in the award's 60-year history, behind only Johnny Podres in 1955 and Tom Seaver in '69.īumgarner, 25, was four years old when he noticed the mountain wind. It has been, is and will be home to the latest legend from the foot of the Blue Ridge: the greatest pitcher in World Series history and the 2014 SI Sportsman of the Year. It is 23 miles south of Boone, a town named for legendary pioneer Daniel Boone, who established camp there, and 66 miles southwest of Mount Airy, the inspiration for television's Mayberry. It is 17 miles south of Blowing Rock, where the snow is said to fall upside down, ever since a benevolent wind raised a fallen Cherokee brave from the valley below to his love on the rock high above. It is about 12 miles from Brown Mountain, where strange lights glow like balls of fire in the night sky, still nearly as much a mystery as they were when the Cherokee thought they were torch-carrying maidens searching the mountain for their loved ones lost in battle. To stand on the knob of land in Lenoir, where Bumgarner's barn sits amid his 116 acres, is to stand in the footsteps of the Catawba and the Cherokee. "So this will be the first time," he says, "outside of family and friends."
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