Tonight was an Odd Couple game featuring ornery left-hander Madison Bumgarner and quiet eccentric Zack Greinke that wound up playing out along the same lines as their public personas. Bumgarner threw 101 shaggy pitches across 5 messy innings basically from the stretch while Greinke was neat, precise, and quick in 6 innings of professorial work.
Bumgarner has walked 10 and struck out 15 over his past three starts (17 innings) and they’ve all looked roughly the same: questionable command of his pitches, rough-at-best stuff, and shaky control of the strike zone.
His velocity hasn’t been alarmingly low and he’s come out of the gate with pitches that seem to have Bumgarnerian movement on them, he just doesn’t seem to have the necessary muscle memory to get the ball to go where he wants it to, and at no point tonight did the Diamondbacks hitters look uncomfortable against him.