One year ago the New York Mets and Chicago Cubs lost more games than they won. In 2015, starting Saturday night, they will meet for the National League Championship Series to determine which team will represent the league in the World Series.
Thursday night the Mets edged the Los Angeles Dodgers 3-2 with a gritty performance by starter Jacob deGrom and a one-man offensive show from 2nd baseman Daniel Murphy. Murphy either drove in or scored all three runs for the Mets, featuring a steal of 3rd base while the Dodgers infielders were taking a nap and a go-ahead home run off Dodgers’ starter Zack Greinke in the sixth inning.
Murphy’s amazing Division Series performance was as unexpected as it was spectacular. He is not a power hitter; he hit a career-high 14 home runs in 538 plate appearances during the regular season. But in the playoffs, he hit solo home runs in Games 1 and 4 off 3-time Cy Young Award winner Clayton Kershaw and then another off Greinke, who won the award in 2009 with Kansas City and will likely be 2nd in the voting this year.
The other superb performance in Game 5 came from deGrom. The Mets’ 2nd-year hurler was dominant in Game 1, striking out 13 in 7 innings. In Game 5, he did not have his best stuff. deGrom gave up four consecutive hits in the first inning to allow the Dodgers to take a 2-1 lead. He was clearly on the ropes but struck out the last two batters to get out of the jam. In an outing in which he gave up 6 hits while walking 3, deGrom pitched out of trouble in the first five of the six innings that he completed. The long-haired right-hander “only” struck out 7 batters in this outing; 6 of them occurred with runners in scoring position. In fact, 61 of deGrom’s 105 pitches were thrown in the high-pressure situations of having a runner on 2nd or 3rd base.
Bottom line: deGrom faced off against the pitchers (Kershaw and Greinke) who will almost certainly finish 2nd and 3rd in the National League Cy Young voting this year and he beat them both.
This series win was a great one for a team that started fast in 2015 but started to look like the same old Mets teams that fans have endured for the better part of the last decade. After a brutal rain-delayed 8-7 loss to San Diego in late July in which the New Yorkers blew a 6-run lead, the Mets had a 52-50 record, only alive in the race (3 games behind) because of the ongoing mediocrity of the division leading Washington Nationals. But something Amazin’ happened: the Nationals came to town and Wilmer Flores, just days shy of his 24th birthday, hit a game-winning walk-off home run in the bottom of the 12th inning. Just two days earlier, the Venezuela native was on the field, in tears because of Twitter rumors that he had been traded from the team that he signed with at the age of 16. It was a script out of a Hollywood movie. Two days after Flores’ dramatic walk-off, the Mets completed a 3-game sweep to tie the Nationals in the standings; it was the last day they would not have sole possession of first place.
Because the Flores trade fell through (indended to Milwaukee in a deal for Carlos Gomez), Mets General Manager Sandy Alderson turned to Plan B and landed Yoenis Cespedes from Detroit. The Cuban-born Cespedes carried the team to a big lead with a torrid offensive display: in his first 41 games with New York, Cespedes hit 17 home runs with 42 runs batted in. The Mets won 30 out of those 41 games and essentially wrapped up the division.
Now the Mets take on the Chicago Cubs, into the NLCS for the first time since a crushing 7-game loss to the eventual champion Florida Marlins in 2003. The Cubs, who improved by 24 games over 2014 under the stewardship of new manager Joe Maddon, have been the hottest team in baseball for more than two months. Since July 28th, the Cubs are 45-18, better than all other 29 teams in baseball. They have the hottest pitcher on the planet in Jake Arrieta who, in his last 18 starts during the regular season, went 17-1 with a 0.89 ERA, which included a no-hitter. Arrieta followed that up with a complete game shutout in the Wild Card game in Pittsburgh. The Cubs’ ace did show some chinks in the armor, though, in Game 3 of the Division Series when he allowed 4 runs in 5.2 innings to St. Louis.
This is an LCS match-up that never could have happened until the Wild Card era and divisional realignment in 1995; both teams were members of the NL East until 1994 (along, incidentally with both St. Louis and Pittsburgh). The Cubs of course have been baseball’s laughingstock for over a century. The last time the Cubs won the World Series, Teddy Roosevelt was president (it was 1908). The last time the Cubs even made the World Series was just two months after the nuclear blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II (in 1945 in case you skipped history classes every year of your life).
So the lovable and longtime loser Cubs will certainly be the sentimental favorite of every baseball fan who isn’t a Mets fan. This will be a ratings bonanza for TBS, with two of the three biggest media markets and the national interest the Cubs will provide. Game 1 is Saturday night !!
Thanks for reading
Chris Bodig