Sluggers essential as MLB Playoffs begin

With the first week of the MLB Playoffs in the books, we have gotten a look at every team and already have one team with a ticket punched to a championship series. The regular season ended with lots of high stake games, but in the end there was no real shuffling, as the New York Mets and San Francisco Giants held their wild card slots in the National League and the Toronto Blue Jays and Baltimore Orioles claimed the spots in the American League.

The Wild-Card Playoff games have remained as great as when they were first implemented four years ago. In the American League game, the battle between two hard hitting teams ended up being a pitcher’s duel.

With the score knotted at 2-2 from the fifth inning onwards, the Orioles brought in Ubaldo Jiménez to pitch for the Orioles after Brian Duensing struck out the first batter of the 11th.

Many baseball fans questioned why the Orioles did not bring in All-Star and Cy Young candidate pitcher Zach Britton, as Jiménez has a history of being unreliable. Jiménez fittingly gave up three straight hits, the last of which was a 430-foot no-doubt home run off the bat of Edwin Encarnación to send the Orioles home.

The National League Wild Card game also turned into a pitcher’s duel, but that was expected with Noah Syndergaard and Madison Bumgarner on the mound. Neither pitcher gave up a run, but Syndergaard lasted seven innings.

In the top of the ninth inning, the Giants’ Conor Gillaspie hit a huge three-run homerun off Mets’ closer Jeurys Familia, and Madison Bumgarner extended his postseason scoreless streak to 23 innings by throwing a complete game shutout to win the game for the Giants.

These results meant we got two great matchups in the Division Series. In the American League, baseball fans got a rematch of last year’s explosive division series that turned violent this season. This time around, however, it was the Blue Jays throwing the metaphorical punches.

They rode the power bats of Troy Tulowitzki, José Bautista and Melvin Upton Jr. to take the first two games in Texas.

Then when it came to game three in Toronto, the Blue Jays took advantage of Rougned Odor’s attempt to turn a double play and Josh Donaldson managed to score from second base when Odor’s throw went wide.

In the National League, two of the favorites to win it all go head to head. The Giants and the Cubs is a matchup of the strongest postseason team against the strongest regular season team. The Giants postseason magic may have come to an end, however, losing the first two games on the road to strong Cubs pitching, but you can never count them out with Bumgarner on the team.

Ultimately, in a tightly contested series the Cubs emerged victorious in four games, as they look to at long last break the Curse of the Billy Goat and bring a World Series title to the North Side for the first time in 107 years.

The last two series are the Boston Red Sox against the Cleveland Indians and the Washington Nationals against the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Indians managed to ride some big hitting innings to take the first two games at home against the Red Sox and then close the sweep in a tightly contested game three at Fenway Park that brought an end to the Red Sox season.

Just across the Beltway, the Nationals and Dodgers split the first two games in Washington, D.C., as well as game three and game four in Chavez Ravine. This sets the two teams up for an epic game-five showdown to decide the series on Thursday night in the nation’s capital.

The biggest takeaways from this postseason have been that good pitching can carry a team very far, but when the bats get going, they get going in a big way. It seems like every time a team scores this postseason, it is via the home run, because pitchers are just not giving up multiple hits in an inning.

But the hitters have been responding by driving runs in with a single swing. There has been at least one home run in all 11 games so far this postseason, and there have been 27 home runs total. There have been two games where home runs made up all the runs, and overall home runs have made up 51 percent of the runs scored.

So with plenty of souvenirs flying, stay locked in as there are bound to be plenty more to come.