This is the story of Madison Bumgarner killing a snake and saving a rabbit’s life

Trust me and listen to all two minutes of the great Vin Scully telling this story during a Dodgers-Giants broadcast.

Here is the story in text, originally from Tom Verducci’s 2014 profile of MadBum in Sports Illustrated:

This may be the best Boone-like tale about the man they call Mad Bum. One day during spring training this year in Scottsdale, Bumgarner and his wife were roping cattle when Madison was startled by a large snake he figured was a rattler. He quickly grabbed an ax and hacked it to pieces. When Ali, an expert field dresser, examined what was left of the snake, she found two baby jackrabbits inside pieces of it and extracted them. A short while later the Bumgarners noticed that one of the rabbits had moved slightly. It was alive. Ali brought the rabbit back to their apartment and for the next few days kept it warm and bottle-nursed it. The rabbit soon was healthy enough for them to release into the wild.

“Think about how tough that rabbit was,” Bumgarner says. “First it gets eaten by a snake, then the snake gets chopped to pieces, then it gets picked up by people and it lives. It’s all true.”

The pace of baseball is often criticized, but the flip side of that is that there is time for Vin Scully to spin a yarn about snake murder and rabbit rebirth punctuated by a “Meanwhile, line drive base hit to center.” What a sport.

By the way, this isn’t even the best story from that SI profile. That would be the fact that Madison Bumgarner once dated a girl named Madison Bumgarner.