Madison Bumgarner gets into an intense staredown with ump Joe West

San Francisco Giants ace Madison Bumgarner has a reputation for being one of the more fiery pitchers in baseball. And Joe West has a reputation for being — well, how should we put this nicely? — the most contentious ump in the game. And that’s not just our opinion. You need only to search West’s name on the Internet to see words like “awful” and “idiocy.”

So you can see how the combination of Bumgarner and West could be combustible. And, to little surprise, it was Thursday night.

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Watch the video above for a good ol’ pitcher-umpire staredown. West steps outside of his usual position and stares down Bumgarner for 17 or 18 seconds. Bumgarner’s not one to back down from chopping a tree or dressing up like Paul Bunyan, so he dang sure isn’t going to back away from an umpire. It was quite a performance between these two and it continued into the postseason interviews, where Bumgarner’s response to John Shea of the San Francisco Chronicle is worth a chuckle:

“Joe was behind the plate?” asked Bumgarner, showing his serious look. “I don’t pay attention to the umpires. I didn’t even realize he was back there.”

Yeah, we could see how Bumgarner didn’t even *notice* the home-plate umpire.

Silly business aside, if you’re looking to assign the role of instigator here, it’s unquestionably West. You’ll notice that Bumgarner is angry after walking Jedd Gyorko in the sixth inning. But Bumgarner gets angry a lot. That doesn’t always lead to reactions like we saw from West.

[Elsewhere: For the first time ever, the Royals have won the AL Central.]

He came out from behind catcher Buster Posey and stood there, staring at Bumgarner. Bumgarner was looking at the outfield at the time, so West went out of his way to make a point and engage in a clash. We’ve seen this type of thing from West before, either with Jonathan Papelbon last season or Torii Hunter earlier this year.

This wasn’t quite as ridiculous as when umpire Andy Fletcher tried to charge the mound (!!) against Jon Lester earlier this season, but it’s a straight-up ump show nonetheless.

West is the longest-tenured umpire in MLB and is president of the umpire’s union, so don’t expect much to happen to him because of this latest incident. We’ll just keep riding on this same merry go-round until he retires.

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