Day: October 9, 2019

Howie Kendrick hit a grand slam in extra innings. How’s that for a big moment?

The Dodgers staked Walker Buehler to a 3-0 lead, but the Nats managed to climb back in the eighth with back-to-back homers off the best pitcher of his generation, Clayton Kershaw. And then came Kendrick

I don’t usually root for or against specific teams, but in this case I’m happy to see a win for the scrappy underdogs, and it’s nice to see Kendrick clean his slate after having played first base as poorly as Doctor Strangeglove himself. After that dinger, nobody will ever remember those errors.

By the way, did you look at Kendrick’s regular season stats? At age 36 he batted .344 with a .967 OPS.

It was another good day for the Yankees, even though they didn’t play. The National League’s two strongest teams were eliminated, making the league send a representative to the World Series with no more than 93 wins.

Remember how the Braves had not won a post-season series since time immemorial?

They still haven’t.

They lost control of this game immediately. In the the entire history of major league ball, no team had ever scored ten runs in the first inning of a post-season game.

Now they have.

The Cards sent fourteen batters to the plate in that inning. Among the first eleven, only one made an out, and that was intentional. (There was a sac bunt early in the inning when it was still possible that a single run might be important.) The Braves’ Mike Foltynewicz had a 162.00 ERA for this game!