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So Conor Gillaspie in 2016 is Marco Scutaro from 2012 or Travis Ishikawa from 2014 or Cody Ross from 2010, at least for one enormous Wild-Card game and that means it could go on and on again… And Madison Bumgarner in 2016 is… Madison Bumgarner, the perpetual postseason legend. That’s a two-paragraph summary of the Giants’ scintillating 3-0 Wild-Card victory over the Mets tonight, and yes, obviously, the patterns and connections from the previous three Giants postseason trips are impossible to ignore. You know who probably understands this better than anybody? That’d be the Cubs, who now face the Giants...

Craig Kimbrel is supposedly the heir to Mariano Rivera. In his postseason career as closer, Rivera recorded 27 appearances of 2+ innings. Uribe bunted two balls foul, ... and then tomahawked a high fastball from David Carpenter into left-field stands for a shocking two-run homer .... Note that I wrote "David Carpenter" and not "Craig Kimbrel." The Braves had to win this game. Lose, and they go home. Somehow they lost -- in the late innings, no less -- without using the most dominant relief pitcher in the game. The sad thing is, Gonzalez apparently didn't even think of using...

If there is justice, in the Atlanta Braves clubhouse and elsewhere, someone is performing early and often intervention upon Brooks Conrad.] Five thousand minor league plate appearances, almost, worth of earning a full-season shot in the majors (he'd had a cup of coffee with the Oakland Athletics and maybe a quarter pot with the Braves prievious to 2010), and this has to happen to the substitute second baseman Sunday. About the only thing for which the thirty-year-old journeyman can be thankful is that it didn't happen in the World Series, to which the Braves hope to send retiring manager Bobby...

Live thread for this weekend's MLB division series action

It only took a mere 54 years to stand between the first and the newest hitless, runless postseason pitching performance---by a pitcher who had already pitched a perfect game early in the regular season. OK, so Roy Halladay Wednesday afternoon walked Jay Bruce---whose walkoff, leadoff bomb got the Cincinnati Reds here in the first place---on a full count with two out in the fifth. He didn't have to be reminded that nobody's perfect, if you didn't count that fine day in May when he cleaned, scaled, and stuffed the Florida Marlins on eleven strikeouts and no Fish getting to within...

5:37 CDT first pitch at Wrigley Field in Chicago! Dempster vs. Lowe. Line-ups will be announced soon.

The Atlanta Braves held off the Astros in Game 4 of the NLDS by a score of 6-5. The big plays were a three run homer by Adam Laroche, an inning-ending 4-1 put out by Marcus Giles and John Smoltz, A go-ahead RBI single by J.D. Drew, and a game-ending 6-3 double play started by Rafael Furcal, who delayed his 21-day sentence for DUI by another day. Hopefully, this Game 5 will end better than last year's loss to the Cubs, after which I had to endure an eight-block walk back to my van while listening to Cubs fans scream...