Playoff Miscellany: Cardinals and Giants Close It Out, NLCS on Tap

cardinals logoTwo days without baseball. That’s what we’re facing now that each of the NLDS were decided last night …

  • Clayton Kershaw dominated the Cardinals for six innings on three days’ rest, preserving the Dodgers’ 2-0 lead. In the 7th, Kershaw “gave up” a dribbler to Matt Holliday that Dee Gordon got a glove on, and then a little looper to Jonny Peralta that Hanley Ramirez almost caught. And then Matt Adams hit a three-run homer to give the game to the Cardinals. If that ain’t voodoo magic, consider this: the homer was the first homer a lefty has *EVER* hit off of a Clayton Kershaw curveball. Couple that with how much Kershaw has dominated lefties this year, and how much Adams has struggled against them … you won’t convince me otherwise. There’s a voodoo queen lurking somewhere in the Louisiana bayou with a particular affection for Cardinal red, and a stockpile of tinctures and powders and pins and tall dolls with long hair that throw lefty.
  • The Adams homer:
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  • By the way, Matt Adams: I don’t have a problem with you celebrating immediately on a homer like that, because it was a huge moment. But I do have a problem with you celebrating immediately on a ball that only barely got out. If that hits the wall, which it almost did, you just crushed a long single, and became an hilarious meme.
  • Don Mattingly is going to catch a lot of heat for benching Yasiel Puig to start the game (one item to which folks will point: Puig’s replacement, Andre Ethier, got caught napping at third base at a particularly unfortunate time), and for not going to his closer, Kenley Jansen, in that 7th inning with the game on the line. The former was simply a silly decision, but the latter is hard to rip Mattingly too much. Kershaw was cruising and dominates lefties. Besides, you wouldn’t know to get Jansen up until it was probably too late anyway.
  • The Giants also won a 3-2 clincher by taking the lead in the 7th. The Nationals are doomed to be a great team, either on paper or in the regular season standings, for years to come … but they will never win a postseason series.
  • The first game of the NLCS isn’t until Saturday in St. Louis. Anyone else tired of seeing the Cardinals and Giants? Also: go Giants.
  • written by

    Brett Taylor is the Lead Cubs Writer at Bleacher Nation, and you can find him on Twitter at @BleacherNation and on LinkedIn here. Brett is also the founder of Bleacher Nation, which opened up shop in 2008 as an independent blog about the Chicago Cubs. Later growing to incorporate coverage of other Chicago sports, Bleacher Nation is now one of the largest regional sports blogs on the web.

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