Madison Bumgarner moved to 60-day DL in defiance of God (and to make room for Andrew Suarez)

In order to make room on the 40-man roster for today’s starter Andrew Suarez without losing any active players to the waiver wire, the Giants made a surprising move:

This follows yesterday’s move to place Johnny Cueto on the 10-day DL to get 40-man guy Tyler Beede onto the 25-man and into the rotation for his debut against the Diamondbacks. It means that the Giants will have pitchers make their debuts in back to back games for the first time since September 1976 (look! here’s another tweet!):

... which, to put that in perspective, was two months before the original ROCKY was released.

The Giants have lost 60% of their rotation just 10 games into the season and they’re now relying on Ty Blach, Chris Stratton, Tyler Beede, Andrew Suarez... and Derek Holland, which is funny and, actually, I’m laughing. There’s not much else that can be done except hope for the offense to start generating a lot more runs.................................................

But back to the 60-day DL move for Bumgarner, as soon as I saw the news today I remembered this Twitter exchange from yesterday in relation to the Cueto move and call-up shuffling...

Which means that Bobby Evans fought Madison Bumgarner at some point in the middle of the night and won. How far has Madison Bumgarner fallen that he’s now losing fights to khaki-cladd managers like Bobby Evans? He will have spent the equivalent of an entire baseball season on the disabled list by the time he comes back in 2018, and it would seem that sitting out all of those games has made him soft. And weak. The exact qualities you want in an ace starting pitching...

In the meantime, if you’re thinking about the new guy’s debut this afternoon, here’s what Roger had to say about Suarez in minor lines on August 29, 2017:

Suarez hasn’t allowed more than 2 ER in a game since July 17 — a stretch of eight games and 50.1 total innings. Over that same time he’s struck out 43 batters. Suarez has definitely been one of the relatively few Giants’ farmhands to take an unambiguous step forward this year.

So, there’s that. He has the organization’s faith and he was effective down the stretch last season. He also had 13 strikeouts in 14 spring training innings... though spring stats are hardly indicative of regular season performance... and he’s got a tough task in taking on the Diamondbacks’ offense (my review: Paul Goldschmidt and A.J. Pollock hit the ball too hard and need to stop that), but the Giants have faced a lot of tough tasks already in the first couple of weeks of the season and they’ve been... you know... not abjectly terrible.