Sorry to disappoint you. It's not that Madison Bumgarner's Wednesday night masterpiece was anything resembling boring, but that masterpiece plus the Giants' bludgeoning of the Pirates in the National League's wild card game wasn't exactly the kind of hair raiser the Royals and the Athletics raised up the night before.
Maybe we should have listened to the anonymous scout who surveyed the National League races in mid-September and concluded the wild card side of the race "is just for the right to get beat by Madison Bumgarner in the wild card game." All he missed was the right to get smothered by Brandon Crawford in the top of the fourth. With predictions like that the guy should be dealing in stock tips.
Well, why the hell not? If the Giants weren't quite enough to overtake the Dodgers for the NL West title, they were just enough to sink the Pirates after the Pirates went for broke trying to win the NL Central but settled for a shot at the Giants for the card. It wasn't in the cards for the Pirates, after all, but thanks to Bumgarner the Giants turned up aces Wednesday night.
Come to think of it, it turned out Bumgarner himself had a prediction of his own before the game. It's said he went to the Giants' bullpen corps and practically told them to just take the night off, relax, and enjoy the game, because he planned on going the distance and getting them into the division series against the Nationals.
A lot of players from both teams were watching the thriller in Kansas City Tuesday night. Maybe Crawford decided it was a fool's errand even to think that his Giants and those Pirates should try for a few chills themselves instead of letting the Royals and the A's have all the fun.
You'd make the same decision if you were hitting with the bases loaded in the fourth and Edinson Volquez, the Pirates' starter, fed you a breaking ball with enough hang time that you could have addressed and stamped it before you sent it to its destination about four rows into the right field seats. Crawford couldn't have picked a better time to land the first extra-base belt of his life off Volquez after bringing a lifetime 3-for-21 jacket against him to the plate.
Bumgarner worked the Pirates almost as thought he thought he'd need only one measly run to work with. The Pirates were useless against his fastball, going 0-for-15 with four punchouts when the put-away pitch was the fastball, but six of Bumgarner's ten punchouts on the night came with his curve ball.
Is that beginning to sound like a Sandy Koufax recap? Be advised that Bumgarner joins Koufax and Justin Verlander as the only postseason pitchers ever to nail an elimination game of any kind with a 10-punchout shutout. Koufax did his in Game Seven of the 1965 World Series; Verlander in Game Five of the 2012 American League division series. Like Bumgarner, Verlander's gem was a 4-hitter; Koufax's was a 3-hit job.
Bumgarner wasn't the only Giant to step into elite company Wednesday night. Crawford became the first shortstop ever to hit a postseason salami. That means there's been one from every field position. About the only thing wrong with Crawford's big bomb was how hard it probably was on his sister. Amy Crawford is dating Pirates right-hander Gerrit Cole.
Crawford is also only the fifth man ever to slice salami in a postseason elimination game. He joins Bill Skowron (Yankees; Game 7, 1956 World Series), Troy O'Leary (Red Sox; Game 5, 1999 American League division series), Johnny Damon (Red Sox; Game 7, 2004 American League Championship Series), and Buster Posey (Giants; 2012 National League division series).
Volquez was on the mound for the Pirates mostly because they went for absolute broke and sent young howitzer Cole out in a bid to steal the NL Central from the Cardinals. The trouble was, they had to go through Johnny Cueto and the Reds to do it, and while Cole was almost as good as Cueto Sunday afternoon Cueto outlasted him just enough to win his 20th game.
It's not that Volquez was a truly dubious choice. He took a streak of ten consecutive starts without a loss into the wild card game. If he wasn't Bumgarner he wasn't exactly cause for the Pirates to go into the game needing tranquilizers. Why, he shook off Pablo Sandoval's leadoff single and a walk to Brandon Belt to squirm out of the second inning and made waste of a two-out single in the third by luring Buster Posey into flying out to right.
The bad news was Kung Fu Panda opening the San Francisco fourth with another single. This time, Hunter Pence looked at a strike before singling Sandoval to second, and Belt walked on a full count. Then, Volquez had Crawford set up on 1-2. Then came the hanger. And there went the hanger. Only then could Volquez get himself three outs to follow.
"When that ball went over the fence," said Giants pitcher Tim Hudson, "I mean, game over with Bum on the mound. You give Bum a 4-0 lead, and I don't give a damn. Let's go spray some champagne."
Maybe the key for the Pirates was to find some way to change the rules and led Volquez pitch in odd-numbered innings only. He zipped through the Giants one-two-three in the fifth but ran into opening trouble in the sixth, when Pence worked him back from 1-2 into a full-count walk and ended Volquez's evening in the hole.
In came Justin Wilson, over to second went Pence on a 1-1 wild pitch to Belt, and into right field went Belt's line drive RBI single. Wilson struck out Crawford but walked Travis Ishikawa before yielding to Jared Hughes, who kept the Giants at bay the rest of the inning but ran into big trouble in the seventh. He surrendered a leadoff single to Joe Panik, who obviously doesn't live up to his moniker in a pressure game, then yielded a single to Posey and a walk to Sandoval.
The good news for Hughes was Pence grounding one to second and Panik getting thrown out at the plate. The bad news was second and third with one out and Belt smacking the first pitch up the pipe for a two-run single. Bobby LaFramboise got Crawford to dial area code 4-6-3 for the side, but his relief John Holdzkom couldn't hold the Giants back after getting two swift outs, with a walk to Gregor Blanco, a single from Panik, and an RBI single from Posey.
Bumgarner was in such cruise control that he could have afforded to tell the Pirates what was coming and throw it where they wanted it and they still wouldn't have dented him. Any ideas manager Bruce Bochy might have had about going to his pen for the ninth got dented promptly enough.
"[You] couldn't have gotten him out of there with a tractor," Bochy said like a straight man after the game. "It would have had to be a big one," Bumgarner said with a laugh. "A real big one. At least two hundred horsepower."
Coming from a fellow who first made his postseason presence known seriously with eight shutout innings in a 2010 World Series game, when he was a mere 21, that tractor might need to be double the horse.
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