It was a great night for Canada, a good day for the District of Columbia and a wet day in Boston.
- I’ll start with some Giants stories, since their season ends tonight. (As I tempt the baseball fates to strike me down.) Mark Saxon writes that the Giants are looking to Madison Bumgarner to save their season.
- Ken Rosenthal notes that Bumgarner and Cubs ace Jake Arrieta have a lot more in common than you might think at first glance. Rosenthal also has a lot more about the Cubs/Giants series, including some stuff on Willson Contreras.
- Jayson Stark wonders if the Giants have it in them to score enough runs to beat the Cubs.
- Michael Baumann believes that Buster Posey will have to step up and lead the offense for the Giants to have a chance.
- Posey admits the Giants have a tough task ahead of them.
- The Blue Jays became the first team to win their division series as they beat the Rangers in extra innings last night to sweep the Rangers. Jim Caple notes that it was especially sweet to beat the Rangers, after all the bad blood between the two teams.
- Jeff Passan thinks the series got an ending as epic as the rivalry.
- Stephen Hunt thinks the better team won.
- Bill Baer thinks the Blue Jays ability to drive up the Rangers’ pitch counts was the key to sweeping the series.
- Matt Snyder thinks that despite being one of the few sluggers on the Blue Jays not to homer, Josh Donaldson was the MVP of the series.
- Normally when you ask someone on a winning team who they want to face in the next round, they’ll say it doesn’t matter. But Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro made it clear he wants to face the Indians in the next round. Not because he thinks they’ll be easier to beat, but because he wants his former team to have as much success as possible.
- No more beer in cans at Rogers Centre. So I guess they’ll ban Loonie Beer Night next?
- Before we leave the Rangers for the winter, Jean-Jacques Taylor notes that Adrian Beltre always plays hard and with a smile on his face.
- Despite the rainout in Boston, Indians manager Terry Francona said he won’t back off on using reliever Andrew Miller as much as necessary.
- Chris Bahr praises the way that Francona is managing his bullpen.
- In case you’ve been closely following the David Ortiz Retirement Tour, if the Red Sox lose today, that will be the end of the line for Big Papi’s career.
- LeBron James is cheering for the Indians now. Total bandwagon fan. He was even cheering for the Warriors until the last game of the NBA Finals last year.
- The Nationals tied up their NLDS series by beating the Dodgers 5-2 yesterday. The big blow was a three-run home run by catcher Jose Lobaton. Dayn Perry notes that Lobaton’s unlikely heroics is a reminder that anything can happen in October baseball.
- Mike Bauman credits the Nationals bullpen for the big win.
- Of course, you could blame the Dodgers instead, who went 0 for 5 with the bases loaded in yesterday’s game.
- Gabe Lacques writes that Nationals second baseman Daniel Murphy is showing the same heroics this year that he did in last year’s playoffs.
- Nats managers Dusty Baker defended his poor-hitting shortstop Danny Espinosa by asking “Who else do I have?” In Sunday’s game, Espinosa got on base twice by getting hit by a pitch. I think he’s finally figured out a way to get on base.
- Yankees general manager Brian Cashman said that fans should expect 2017 to be another rebuilding year in the Bronx. John Harper says that Cashman is right and right to tell the fans that. When the best pitcher on the free agent market is a 37-year-old Rich Hill, who was playing indy ball in 2015, then fans have got to know that the Yankees aren’t going to be able to buy a title anytime soon.
- The Diamondbacks are looking for a new GM, but former Blue Jays GM Alex Anthopoulos says he’s not interested in the job.
- Nor is Rays VP Chaim Bloom. Does anyone want this job? (The answer is yes. The real question is does anyone good want the job?)
- The Braves are down to three candidates for their vacant managerial job.
- Commissioner Rob Manfred attempted to justify the low wages paid to minor leaguers by pointing out the big bonuses given out to players when they sign. One problem: the vast majority of minor leaguers do not get big bonuses. The other thing that Manfred never attempts to justify is that when adjusted for inflation, minor league salaries were far higher back in the 1970s than today. But that’s my own rant.
- Jim Caple isn’t happy with the current replay system in regards to tag plays and staying on the base.
- Matt Shoemaker, who was badly injured on a line drive off the bat of Kyle Seager, revealed that Seager checks in on him almost every day to see how he’s doing.
- Doug Glanville writes that his own turn at doing play-by-play made him appreciate how hard it was for Vin Scully to make it seem so effortless every game.
- Keith Olbermann shares the only known color photographs of Don Larsen’s World Series perfect game. They’re not exactly professional photos, but if you like to know what baseball in the 1950s really looked like in color, they’re great.
- And finally, we all know that Rich Hill has had blister problems this year. What we didn’t learn until this weekend is that he tried some pretty weird things to try to avoid them. Let’s just say one of them he could have picked up from Moises Alou in spring training one year with the Cubs.
And tomorrow will be a better day than today, Buster. Let’s finish off the Giants tonight.