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CHICAGO — So, 71 years later, this is what it looks like when the Chicago Cubs storm into the World Series…

Anthony Rizzo hitting everything Clayton Kershaw threw him on the screws: a double, a long ball, a fly ball in the first inning that Los Angeles Dodgers left fielder Andrew Toles plumb dropped. Was that a goat impeding his vision?

Kris Bryant hungrily taking a seven-decades-sized bite into Kershaw’s 95 mph cheese and looping an RBI single to right field just two batters into the bottom of the first, immediately flipping the switch from anxiety to anticipation.

Javier Baez alertly doing it again, letting a line drive skip in order to short-hop it, starting another double play and stamping another exclamation mark onto his postseason wizardry.

Kyle Hendricks, a 26-year-old right-hander acquired from Texas for Ryan Dempster four years ago, handling the Dodgers with the touch of a jeweler and the heart of a lion, mowing through 17 in a row after a rare error on Baez in the second.

Wrigley Field, stuffed with 42,386 for the game of their lives, those fans leaning into this 5-0 World Series-punching ticket like few other games in the park’s 102-year history, inhaling nervously, exhaling in relief, screaming, singing, dancing, pleading and, in many cases, shedding tears of joy.

No fear. No goats. No errors.

The Chicago Cubs, lovable winners.

“Perception,” Cubs manager Joe Maddon said when this historical event was finished, standing near the pitcher’s mound, thousands of fans still in their seats, hundreds of people on the field, addressing how life had permanently changed by evening’s end. “That’s the big part of it.

“The thing I was always hearing was that the Cubs are lovable losers. I never quite understood that. That’s not the way I was raised.”

It’s not the way he’s raising these young Cubbies, clearly.

“Listening to talk about superstition and all that nonsense, that dragged a lot of people down,” Maddon continued. “I think the perception changes.”

These Cubs are so cool, display so much grace under pressure, that Steve Bartman could have tossed out the ceremonial first pitch before Game 6 and it wouldn’t have fazed them one iota.

So this, too, is what it looks like when the Cubs charge into the World Series: Hall of Famer Billy Williams standing on the field amid the celebration, nearly swallowed by the roaring wall of sound in the minutes after the final out and practically being overcome with emotion.

“I think of all the fellas I played with like Ernie [Banks] and Ron Santo,” Williams said of his two departed teammates. “They’re not here to see it, but I’m thinking about them. Like Jackie Gleason said, ‘How sweet it is!’”

Williams continued: “They’re up there celebrating, too. This is similar to what I thought it would be. I look out at the fans, the full house, the people on the street. You might have 100,000 or 200,000 people out there.

“Everywhere I go in Chicago, people come up to me and say, ‘This is the year! This is the year!’…

“This is really, really great. I can’t hardly explain the feeling I have.”

On Tuesday in Cleveland, the Cubs will play in their first World Series game since Oct. 10, 1945. A Cubs lineup featuring Stan Hack and Peanuts Lowrey was beaten by Hal Newhouser and the Detroit Tigers in Game 7 that day. Two weeks later, the United Nations was founded. Shortly after that, the first ballpoint pens went on sale in New York.

Ballpoint pens?

“This is only the beginning, you know, for myself and for this squad,” shortstop Addison Russell promised. “I’m excited. I’m excited to see what more we can do and what limits we can push. If we can do this in two seasons…”

After winning 97 games last year before running into the wood chipper that was the New York Mets’ pitching staff in the NLCS, they blasted back this year with 103 more wins and raced to baseball’s best overall record.

They took to heart Maddon’s message from day one of spring training: Embrace the target, win every pitch, win every inning, buy into the team.

So this, too, is what it looks like when the Cubs crash the World Series after 71 years: Jason Heyward, who signed an eight-year, $184 million deal last winter, taking his place on the bench for Game 6 Saturday night as Maddon inserted into right field Albert Almora Jr., the first first-round draft pick (sixth overall) of president of baseball operations Theo Epstein and general manager Jed Hoyer after they took over in late 2011.

Heyward’s reaction?

“It’s about the team all season, but even more so in the postseason,” the outfielder said after what seemed like thousands of bottles of Blanc de Blancs champagne had been sprayed, poured, drank and saved. “It’s been that way all year, so many different players helping.

“Joe told us in spring training, if everyone on the roster does one thing positive every night, that’s 25 positive things every night. That’s a lot of positives.”

All of those positives over six weeks of spring training plus 162 regular-season games, then another four more against the San Francisco Giants in the Division Series and, well, six more against the Dodgers in this NLCS…hey, that’s a ton of positives. And at every turn when the Cubs had the chance to hit the skids, they turned it around.

There was the two-week slump just before the All-Star break. The nerves of Game 4 in San Francisco. Maddon reiterated late Saturday night how much he really, really wanted to avoid a Game 5 with the Giants because, even though it would have been in Wrigley Field, he was extremely angst-ridden about the prospect of what Johnny Cueto could do to them.

Hall of Fame manager Sparky Anderson always said that 1984 was his toughest season because of the way the Detroit Tigers raced out to the record-setting 35-5 start. By June, expectations were so high that all that was left for the Tigers to accomplish was to win the World Series. Sparky always said after that, the rest of that summer he feared being the manager to screw it all up.

If Maddon or the Cubs ever had any of that trepidation, they never let on. But when Dodgers pinch hitter Yasiel Puig bounced to into a 6-4-3 double play, Russell to Baez to Rizzo, with closer Aroldis Chapman on the mound, it was as if the lid popped straight off a pressure cooker.

Unleashed, Wrigley Field sent an emotional howl up to the heavens. Couples took selfies in the stands with the mob of celebrating Cubs on the field behind them. Sons high-fived fathers.

Catcher Willson Contreras hurled his glove up toward the stars, then raced to embrace Chapman.

“One more time!” Contreras shrieked to Chapman, referring to Cleveland and the World Series. “One more time! We’ve got to do this one more time!”

Thirty minutes after the game, Contreras, 24, and his glove had yet to be reunited.

“I don’t know where it’s at,” he said. “That was my first reaction when I saw the double play. It’s amazing.”

Everything about this night, this day, this summer in Wrigley Field was and is amazing.

So this, too, is what it looks like when the Chicago Cubs and the World Series meet again, 71 years later: Epstein walking his dog, a mutt named Winston, earlier in the day, through his Wrigleyville neighborhood, encountering all sorts of well-wishers.

“Yeah, walking the dog, people are very into it, as they should be,” said Epstein, who lives seven blocks from Wrigley Field, in those final, jittery hours before the night that will be remembered forever.

“I love being in a city that’s playing October baseball where you can just feel everyone captivated by the ballclub, everyone walking around tired from staying up late, prioritizing baseball above all else. It’s a great phenomenon.”

So, too, is Baez, and Rizzo, and Bryant. And Hendricks, and Russell, and Maddon.

“A lot of them are in their early 20s, and they’re not burdened by that stuff,” Epstein said of the curse.

Nor will they be, ever again.

No fear. No goats. No errors.

The Chicago Cubs, lovable winners.

Scott Miller covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

Follow Scott on Twitter and talk baseball. 

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

LOS ANGELES — Here they go again: The Los Angeles Dodgers, one loss away from clocking out for the final time in 2016, are handing the ball to Clayton Kershaw.

Poor guy. Already, he missed two-and-a-half months this summer with a herniated disk in his back. And this keeps coming up. Pray the Dodgers pack the proper back brace to protect him in Chicago.

Uh-oh. From the good vibrations following Game 3 when the Dodgers edged ahead of the Chicago Cubs in this National League Championship Series, Dave Roberts’ club has backed itself to a cliff’s edge with two hideous clunkers. The latest, Thursday’s 8-4 face-slap, sets up a Game 6 Saturday in which the Cubs, with a win, will clinch their first World Series appearance since 1945.

But that long-haired, left-handed, bearded obstacle standing between the Cubs and the World Series is not a billy goat.

It is Kershaw.

Yeah, we’ve been down that path this postseason. Seems like, oh, about every other day, in fact. Lather, rinse, repeat.

On Saturday, Hollywood’s favorite action hero will spring to life for the fifth time in these playoffs.

It will be third time he’s done it with his team facing elimination.

There was his short-rest Game 4 start in Los Angeles in the Division Series against Washington.

There was the dramatic, seven-pitch, two-out masterpiece in his first career save situation in Game 5 against the Nationals on one day’s rest, as literal a use of the word “save” as you can draw up, with the winner of that game advancing to meet the Cubs.

And now, with L.A. trailing this NLCS three games to two, here comes Saturday.

Somebody asked Kershaw what his “level of excitement” is, pitching in another loser-go-home game.

“I don’t know if excitement’s the right word,” the three-time Cy Young winner and one-time NL MVP winner said drolly. “But it will be exciting if we win, for sure.”

Whatever. It’s guaranteed to be more exciting than watching Kenta Maeda, Luis Avilan, Pedro Baez and the rest of the nondescript, lump-of-coal pitchers the Dodgers employ who are not named Kershaw, Kenley Jansen or Rich Hill.

My goodness. The more you watch the Dodgers this postseason, the more you understand what a miracle it was that they won the NL West. Kershaw has precious little help in the rotation this side of Hill.

The Dodgers got everything anybody could have expected out of Maeda on Thursday night, which was a molasses-slow pace, a dip into the fourth inning and a departure with two out and his team trailing 1-0. Seriously, for a guy who had worked only seven innings over the past two-and-a-half weeks, it wasn’t like anybody expected a Mona Lisa.

From Kershaw, yes. The Dodgers ask and ask and ask.

And?

“I like our chances to win and push this to a Game 7,” Dodgers All-Star first baseman Adrian Gonzalez said. “We had the same situation against Washington, and we took care of it.”

As the Dodgers prepared to charter to Chicago on Friday, they weren’t exactly thrilled that they had let the lead in this NLCS slip away. But they weren’t exactly overly concerned, either.

“First of all, your fly is open,” Gonzalez quipped in response to a person who asked him one of the first questions.

And, darned if Gonzalez’s observational skills weren’t impeccable.

“We’ve won two games in a row before,” Gonzalez continued. “It’s nothing we can’t do Saturday and Sunday.”

Besides, the Dodgers already know what to expect when they arrive at Wrigley Field after splitting Games 1 and 2 there last weekend.

“Same thing we had in Games 1 and 2,” Gonzalez said. “They can’t put more people in the stands. They can’t cheer any louder.

“It’s not like it’s a loud stadium.”

Besides, while the Cubs’ path to the World Series still must run right smack through Kershaw and Hill, the Dodgers can be thankful they no longer have to face Lester. In four starts against the Dodgers this season, Lester produced a stunning 0.96 ERA: 28 innings, three runs, 16 hits, 25 strikeouts and only four walks.

The $155 million the Cubs spent on Lester may be the best money they’ve spent since Harry Caray’s expense account: In dominating the Dodgers over seven innings in Game 5, Lester lowered his career playoff ERA to 2.50 in 119 innings pitched. And this postseason, he’s surrendered only two runs in 21 innings over three starts.

Part of the Dodgers’ strategy against Lester was to bunt, run and make him throw the ball. It’s no secret he has difficulty throwing accurately to first base. Yet after Enrique Hernandez walked on four pitches to start the bottom of the first, and after he took as big a lead as you’ll ever see at first base, dancing, taunting…he didn’t attempt to steal.

“I was trying to get into his head and get J.T. [Justin Turner] a good pitch to hit,” Hernandez explained. “He threw four straight balls to me that were not even close to the strike zone.

“If I tried to steal and was thrown out at second base, it would give him a break.”

The Dodgers’ lack of aggression cost them.

And it shined the spotlight right back at Kershaw, who will pitch Saturday on an extra day’s rest. There was some discussion regarding whether the Dodgers should have started him on short rest in Game 5, but they declined because Kershaw had pitched four times (including the relief appearance) in a 10-day span through his seven shutout innings against the Cubs on Sunday night in Chicago.

The Dodgers would’ve risked riding him too hard.

And besides, somebody else had to pitch at some point. They can’t start Kershaw and Hill all seven games.

So his plan is to show up at Dodger Stadium early Friday and get in his regular between-starts work before the team charter departs for Chicago.

Then, you figure, the next step in the plan is to show up Saturday night in Wrigley dressed in his usual superhero garb.

His degree of difficulty continues to skyrocket, the harder the Dodgers lean on him and the more opposing hitters see him.

“Pitchers definitely don’t have an advantage,” Kershaw said of facing the Cubs a second time since Sunday. “I don’t know if the hitters have an advantage. But pitchers, the more you see somebody, the more familiar you get with them. I mean, that’s true, for sure.

“So I don’t think there’s anything that you do to counteract it. I said this the other day, there’s no secrets in the game right now. There’s so much information. They know every pitch that I throw and every count and every situation. So it’s just a matter of not really focusing on that and just trying to compete every single pitch and execute every single pitch.

“You maybe have less margin for error facing them the second time. Just be better, I guess.”

How much better he can be following his seven-inning, two-hit performance Sunday remains to be seen.

But don’t underestimate what the Dodgers may do if Kershaw pitches them over the valley of death one more time Saturday and into a Game 7 on Sunday.

“This time Kershaw will pitch on zero days’ rest,” Gonzalez said, smiling broadly.

He was kidding. I think.

Scott Miller covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

Follow Scott on Twitter and talk baseball.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

LOS ANGELES — It was that moment when you’re creeping along through gridlock and, suddenly, the freeway opens up.

Addison Russell re-introduced himself to this National League Championship Series by walloping a home run, Anthony Rizzo reminded folks he hasn’t gone anywhere by crushing another, and pretty soon all that was left in view were the taillights of the Chicago Cubs. Vrooom!

You could feel the exhale from the Cubs’ dugout to Venice Beach. Cruisin’, on a Wednesday night.

Now, the unusual thing in the Cubs’ emphatic 10-2 Game 3 statement to even this series at two games apiece was this: A key weapon in the Cubs’ sudden resurrection was the bat of a guy who was left off Chicago’s NLCS roster.

Matt Szczur is 27 years old, a right-handed outfielder and pinch hitter who had five homers and 24 RBI for the Cubs this season. He was the club’s fifth-round draft pick in 2010 and is with the club despite not being active for this series.

It was in the fifth inning Wednesday night, after Rizzo had whiffed in each of his first two at-bats, when the slumping first baseman did what he sometimes does during the regular season: His own bats mostly useless as he was 2-for-28 with nine strikeouts this postseason, he grabbed one of Szczur’s.

The two both use Marucci models that are 34 inches long and weigh 32 ounces, though there are subtle differences. One’s barrel is a little thicker. One’s handle is a little thinner.

Usually, Rizzo is polite and asks Szczur’s permission to use one of his bats.

Wednesday night in Dodger Stadium, he just took it.

In the Cubs dugout, Szczur looked over at teammate Tommy La Stella and said, “Watch this; he’s going to go deep right here.”

And, ka-boom! Rizzo crushed a full-count Pedro Baez fastball over the center field fence.

That bat was not the first thing Szczur (pronounced SEE-zur) has joyfully donated, and it wasn’t the most important. In 2009, when he was a two-sport athlete at Villanova (football and baseball), Szczur donated bone marrow to a 15-month-old girl in Ukraine named Anastasia, who was suffering from leukemia. His football coach at Villanova, Andy Talley, has encouraged his players for 25 years to be tested as potential bone-marrow matches. Szczur took it to heart and joined the national registry.

Nearly two years later, Szczur learned the bone-marrow transplant had been successful, and for the first time he connected with the Ukranian family. They spoke again last month, and ESPN ran an update of its original E:60 feature on him earlier in the day Wednesday.

“I’ve [borrowed Szczur’s bats] a few times, especially later in the year,” said Rizzo, who hit home run Nos. 30 and 31 this season with one of Szczur’s bats. “Especially today, the first two at-bats weren’t so hot. Szcz came out today with a nice feature on him about giving his bone marrow, so all things were adding up.”

That Szczur would be a match to donate bone marrow to a person in need was a 1-in-80,000 shot, according to the Chicago Tribune.

That Rizzo would break out of a nightmarish slump when the Cubs’ season is on the line and then turn around and offer a tip of the cap to Szczur’s inspirational decision from a few years ago, speaks to the depth of humanity of this Cubs team.

There are reasons some teams win, and sometimes the reasons run deeper than simple talent levels.

Szczur had no idea his most recent donation had found its way onto the national telecast of Wednesday night’s game, so you can imagine his shock when he entered the clubhouse after the game and one of the trainers asked him about it.

Funny thing is, Rizzo used one of Szczur’s bats in his final Game 3 plate appearance—the one where he shattered it into three pieces. Then he used his own bat for his first two plate appearances in Game 4, both strikeouts.

“I swear I’m not making that up,” Szczur said, laughing, surrounded by a dozen reporters. “I think it’s funny this is all happening now.

“I’m not even on the roster, and I’m getting interviews.”

Szczur uses a KB-17 model Marucci bat, named after someone else who uses the same model: teammate Kris Bryant. Szczur and Bryant played together starting at the Double-A level, which is where they both gravitated toward the same bat.

At the big league level, both Bryant and Rizzo have borrowed Szczur’s bats, which finally caused him to mention something to the Marucci representative: “Hey, the big dogs are using my bats, you need to send me some more.”

All it took was for Szczur to mention the names of the big dogs were Bryant and Rizzo.

“That was the fastest I ever got ’em,” Szczur said. “I got six bats in two days.”

After Wednesday, Szczur said, Rizzo can use those bats anytime he wants.

And the way things are going, maybe Rizzo better consider it.

Everybody knows the Cubs cannot win the World Series if Rizzo and Russell don’t hit. They escaped San Francisco with the two in dreadful slumps. They fell behind the Dodgers two games to one and arrived at Dodger Stadium on Wednesday just short of desperation with the two not hitting.

Going back to the last part of September in the regular season, Russell, after flying out to left field in the second inning Wednesday, was four for his last 56. He was 1-for-25 this postseason.

Rizzo, into his fifth-inning at-bat, didn’t have an extra-base hit in the playoffs.  

Heading into Game 4, the two were a combined 1-for-20 in the NLCS and 3-for-50 in the postseason.

Manager Joe Maddon said it plainly before Game 4: Rizzo and Russell have to hit for the Cubs to get to where they need to go. Period.

In Game 4, the two combined to go 6-for-10 with two homers, five RBI and four runs scored.

For Chicago, it was a relief not only because these two key players busting out keyed a win and suddenly made the Cubs feel a whole lot better about themselves heading toward Kenta Maeda and Game 5, but because this is a close team that feels badly when one of them hits the skids.

“This guy had 90-some RBI during the season and 20-some home runs,” catcher Miguel Montero said of Russell. “The man can hit.

“They don’t sell those at Walgreens.”

Said Maddon: “It should help their confidence; there’s no question about that. When you’re going through the moment they were, it’s a confidence issue. It always is. So going into [Game 5], I know when they show up at the ballpark, there’s going to be a good balance about them. They’re probably going to see the ball a little better, slow things down a little bit.

“Those are the kind of buzzwords you’re always looking for when a guy starts swinging the bat well.”

Whoever is the rightful owner of the bat.

As far as Szczur is concerned, Rizzo can keep on borrowing.

“He doesn’t owe me anything,” said the man on the outside looking in who suddenly was the most popular Cub in the clubhouse. “Tony’s picked me up at dinner quite a few times.

“He’s been grinding. He always gets hits with my bat. It’s what he needed, I guess.”

And what the Cubs needed.

All he wants out of it, Szczur said, is what he already has: Rizzo’s friendship.

Well, maybe that and a couple more victories.

Scott Miller covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

Follow Scott on Twitter and talk baseball.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

LOS ANGELES — By the end of it, a dominant season suddenly fragile, harrowing memories from last October gnawing at their fringes, this is what the toothless Chicago Cubs were reduced to.

In the ninth inning, Anthony Rizzo hacked at a Kenley Jansen cutter, and his bat exploded into three pieces. The biggest piece, the barrel, somehow helicoptered behind him, U-turning like a boomerang in mid-air, and crashed high into the netting behind the plate. The ball? It dribbled toward first base for a single.

Now, Rizzo was 1-for-11 in this National League Championship Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers.

“Broken bat pieces were flying everywhere,” Cubs third baseman Kris Bryant marveled. “That’s the hit we needed.”

That’s what the Cubs were reduced to. A 6-0 pummeling in Game 3, the humiliation of 18 consecutive scoreless innings (and counting) heading into Game 4 and they were hanging onto this as maybe the hit that will scoot them out of their collective slump.

Maybe it’s not quite time to break the glass in case of emergency.

But maybe it is time to pick up a hammer and move into position.

Just don’t let Rizzo or shortstop Addison Russell be the one to wield that hammer. Those two are a combined 1-for-20 in this LCS and 3-for-50 in this postseason.

“We’re not hitting the ball hard,” Cubs manager Joe Maddon said.

And: “Obviously, I have no solid explanation.”

Now, a team that won 103 games this season and spent just one day (out of 183) not in first place will be furiously playing from behind in Game 4 on Wednesday night and beyond.

History is beginning to sandbag them, and I’m not talking that 108-year World Series drought.

No, I’m talking more recent history: Of the nine times a 100-win team has fallen behind 2-1 in a best-of-seven series since 1985—the challenge the Cubs now face—five times that team went on to lose.

More worrisome for the Billy Goat Gang is that four of the past five 100-win teams to fall behind 2-1 went on to lose: the 2005 St. Louis Cardinals (NLCS vs. the Houston Astros), the 2001 Seattle Mariners (ALCS vs. the New York Yankees), the 1997 Atlanta Braves (NLCS vs. the Florida Marlins) and the 1995 Cleveland Indians (World Series vs. the Braves).

Playing from behind is not something the 2016 Cubs are accustomed to.

But it’s something they are faced with, and there’s increasing urgency.

“I feel like last year, the pitchers beat us [in the NLCS, when the New York Mets swept the Cubs],” Bryant said. “I feel like this year, we’ve had some chances.”

From Maddon to nearly every player in that clubhouse, that’s the feeling. That last October, the Cubs simply ran into the wrong pitching staff at the wrong time. But this year, aside from against Clayton Kershaw in Game 2 (as Maddon succinctly put it, “Kershaw happened”), they’ve had plenty of chances. And they’ve blown them.

“In this game, nothing can surprise you,” Cubs catcher Miguel Montero said. “Obviously, things are happening. Obviously, we had high expectations for ourselves. It’s what’s happening now.

“Maybe have a few drinks tonight and forget about this and come back tomorrow.”

Given how dominant the Cubs were this season, this is the time when we thought we’d be toasting them.

Instead, Maddon adjusted his lineup for Game 3, and more changes are expected for Game 4, while he scrambles to keep the Cubs from becoming toast.

Against left-hander Rich Hill on Tuesday, Maddon moved Javier Baez into the five hole, benched struggling right fielder Jason Heyward, inserted Jorge Soler into right field and flip-flopped Rizzo and Ben Zobrist in the lineup.

With rookie lefty Julio Urias set to start Game 4 on Wednesday, who knows, maybe David Ross will be back behind the plate.

Regardless, there are only so many levers Maddon can pull. His team is his team.

And right now, it is keeping sketchy company:

What if somebody had told Montero before this series started that the Cubs would go 18 consecutive innings without scoring?

“I don’t gamble, but I probably would have gambled on that one,” Montero quipped.

Here’s the risk of tweaking the lineup, as the Cubs did in Game 3: You do it, it doesn’t work, then what? That will be Maddon’s Game 4 challenge. Stick with it? Revert to the way the Cubs were? As he said the other day, during the long season you can give things a few dozen games to settle in. That changes drastically in the postseason.

Before Tuesday’s game, Maddon spoke of “rearranging the chairs.” He also acknowledged a little concern over the fact the Cubs “got stuck” offensively in the NLCS last year.

While getting swept by the Mets, the Cubs batted .164 with a .225 on-base percentage and 37 strikeouts in 128 at-bats (a 28.9 percent rate).

Against the Dodgers, the Cubs are batting .161 with a .235 on-base percentage and 25 strikeouts in 93 at-bats (a 26.9 percent rate).

The numbers are eerily similar. It’s October, and the Cubs couldn’t find home plate with a GPS and a metal detector.

“It’s more of a mental trend than a physical trend,” Maddon said. “You have to be able to push back mentally as much as anything right now. Because when it comes down to work, you don’t need any more batting practice or video study or data information. You just have to mentally hang in there and keep pushing back until you get it.

“It’s just about hard contact. Overall, the at-bats haven’t been that bad. We’re just not hitting the balls. We’re not striking it well. So, we’re making it easier on their defense.”

The Cubs beat the Dodgers in four of seven regular-season games this summer. Maybe they’ll find comfort against Urias on Wednesday night because, unlike Kenta Maeda in Game 1 and Hill in Game 3, they’ve faced Urias this year. He started at Wrigley Field on June 2, and the Cubs ambushed him for eight hits and five earned runs in five innings.

However, in a second meeting with Urias, at Dodger Stadium on Aug. 27, the kid held the Cubs to six hits and one run in six innings.

Still, familiarity usually favors the hitters.

“Obviously, we have a history with him, so it will be easier to establish what we want to do,” Bryant said after a night of watching Hill paint the corners with just two pitches, his 74 mph curve and 91 mph fastball.

Momentum swings are notoriously dramatic in these seven-game series, and as Maddon noted, the narrative will change drastically, again, if the Cubs can beat Urias and the Dodgers in Game 4 and even the series.

“We trust in each other,” Baez said emphatically.

Yeah, well, that’s great.

But you know what would be better for the Cubs? Hits.

Scott Miller covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

Follow Scott on Twitter and talk baseball.

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CHICAGO — The Chicago Cubs led the league this year in, among other things, wins, winning percentage, run differential and multitasking.

Yes, that’s right. Multitasking.

Do you feel pretty accomplished when you knock off three things at once? Look at Javier Baez, who this year became just the fourth Cubs player since 1913 with at least 20 starts at second base, third base and shortstop. He also started twice at first base, vacuumed the Cubs clubhouse after each game and refilled the team’s Gatorade supply daily.

Well, those last couple of things might be a bit of an exaggeration, but the way Baez is stealing hearts (and home plates) this postseason, it’s at least believable.

“He’s probably the most exciting player in baseball right now,” Cubs catcher David Ross raves. “He’s energetic. He’s not scared of the moment. And the flair he has…he’s very, very exciting to watch.”

Meantime…feel like a world-beater when you can text, email and watch your favorite television show all at the same time? Look at Kris Bryant, who probably is on his way to the NL MVP award this season because of the one-of-a-kind combination of his bat and versatility. Bryant in 2016 became only the second player in history to smash at least 35 homers while playing at least 10 games at third base, left field and right field in the same season. Albert Pujols (2001) was the first.

Yes, these Cubs are a postmodern team for a postmodern age. Led by Bryant and Baez, they tweet, they laugh, they win. Every day is Casual Friday.

What’s especially unique is their unselfish, team-first attitude that allows manager Joe Maddon to move them all over the diamond while constructing a lineup that gives the Cubs the best chance to win on that particular night.

Ben Zobrist, who signed a four-year, $56 million free-agent deal last winter, was one of Maddon’s original Swiss Army knives back in Tampa Bay in 2008. From second base to shortstop to the outfield, he changed positions more often than Beyonce changes outfits.

And yet, Bryant absolutely does not remind Zobrist of himself.

“No,” Zobrist says. “Because when I started doing it, it was out of necessity to get into the lineup. The guys who were the stars of the team, like Kris Bryant, wouldn’t do that. So it’s a different situation.

“It’s basically just Joe taking a star and using all of the possible assets that that guy has. And that guy being willing to do that is extremely rare. Extremely rare. Most guys in his position would not do that. That just says the kind of person, the kind of team guy, he is.”

Excuses are available like low-hanging fruit for Bryant to pick if he wanted to play the superstar card: Changing positions every other day, or even in the middle of a game, is too much of a distraction. He might not be comfortable. He could embarrass himself. It could ruin his concentration at the plate.

Instead, Bryant embraces it.

“I’ve played all over the field my whole life so it wasn’t too uncomfortable for me,” he says. “It’s just getting used to the perspectives from each position. Each outfield spot is different for me. But I’ve never felt uncomfortable.”

Even at the major league level, where the stadiums come with three decks and the lights are brighter than Broadway?

“Honestly, I feel like at times at this level it’s easier because you have the better lights, the better visual backdrops, that sort of thing,” Bryant says.

“Obviously, I’ve played third base, but moving around might add a little more of that fresher element.”

That can-do attitude is a lot of what allowed Maddon to create space for Baez. When the season started, Bryant was the third baseman, Addison Russell the shortstop, Zobrist the second baseman and Anthony Rizzo at first. Baez, the Cubs’ first-round draft pick in 2011 (ninth overall), came up through the minors as a shortstop. Any reservations he had about taking new positions out for a test drive were overcome by this realization: Would he rather be playing shortstop at Triple-A Iowa, or a variety of positions in the big leagues?

Baez is immensely popular within the clubhouse, and as if there weren’t a big enough soft spot for him from the beginning, it’s only grown since his sister, Noely, tragically passed away in April 2015. Born with Spina bifida, doctors didn’t think Noely would survive the day she was born. Instead, she lived until she was 21, teaching her brother a thing or two about fighting and living along the way.

Though Noely was able to travel to Denver along with the entire Baez family for his major league debut Aug. 5, 2014, she died the following spring. Baez, who was extremely close with her and has a large tattoo picturing her on his right shoulder, was playing in Triple-A Iowa at the time. He took two weeks away from baseball before he came back.

“From the time we showed up in 2012, we saw how incredibly close Javier was to his sister,” Jason McLeod, the Cubs’ senior vice president of scouting and player development, says. “She was at a lot of his minor league games, right there in the front row in her wheelchair. After the game, he’d go over and give her a kiss.

“It was really fun and special to see how much he cared about her. When she died, we wanted to support him as much as we could. We wanted to be there with open arms when he came back, but first give him the space he needed.”

Baez’s incredible versatility, and eagerness to imitate a disc jockey taking requests, allowed Maddon to deploy a stunning array of lineups this summer. Baez made 38 starts at second base, 36 at third base, 21 at shortstop and even two at first base. Whatever the skipper asked.

Maddon leaned especially hard on Baez’s glove as a weapon with Jon Lester on the mound. Baez was in the starting lineup for 27 of the left-hander’s 32 starts this year, including 18 times at third base, five at shortstop and four at second base. In collaboration with the Cubs’ internal analytics department, Maddon’s method is crystal clear: He wants to place Baez where the Cubs think the most action will be on a given night.

“It makes them tough to game-plan for,” Andy Green, the San Diego Padres manager, says. “You look up on a given day and Javy Baez is playing third base, you immediately know you’re not bunting that day, you immediately know you can’t delay-steal third base, you immediately know he’s going to shut things down because that’s the kind of athlete he is.

“So moving those guys around the diamond changes the context of the game.”

It is this versatility and strategizing that positioned the Cubs to lead the majors with 82 defensive runs saved this summer, according to FanGraphs’ calculation. And it wasn’t even close. Houston was a distant second at 51 runs saved.

Maddon, or a member of his staff, texts the players on the morning of a game so that there are no surprises when they walk into the clubhouse later that day. Bryant’s cellphone will buzz and tell him he’s playing third base tonight, or left field. Same for Baez.

The results speak volumes for what has become a vibrant, energetic and creative culture created under Maddon, president of baseball operations Theo Epstein, general manager Jed Hoyer and the rest of the gang.

“We have guys who are able to understand the overall goal and are willing to get out of their comfort zone for a little bit and try something,” Zobrist says. “It also says Joe believes in players. He believes that if you’re an athlete, you can do it. Even if at first you’re like, ‘Uh, I don’t know.’ He believes you’re capable of doing things you haven’t even thought of before.”

As for the conventional wisdom that suggests changing positions might make a player less effective at the plate because he has so much on his mind, Maddon, the man who preaches that batting practice is overrated anyway, thinks that’s rubbish. Look at Baez this year: He’s significantly reduced his strikeouts. Might frequent position changes actually do the opposite of what some think and free up a player’s mind?

“I totally believe it does work opposite,” Maddon says. “I never believed that by moving them around it [could hurt them at the plate]. I believe that by moving them around it helps them at the plate because you focus so much on your defense you’re not worried so much about your offense.

“I totally believe that by bringing a young guy up, i.e. a Zobrist back in the day, even B.J. Upton…B.J. came up when I was in Tampa and was established as a shortstop. He wasn’t doing that well, so we started moving him around, put him at second base, and I thought he was almost an All-Star candidate before he hurt his leg running to first base in Miami. But he hit.

“He hit by playing different positions. We had him working out at different positions everyday pregame and I thought that would de-emphasize all this work in the cage. Hitters swing too much, they think too much. If all it took was X number of swings in a day or X number of hours of hitting, then everybody would be a .300 hitter. Because everybody puts that time in, and I think it’s counterproductive. I think it works absolutely in reverse. I think there’s a point of diminishing returns that sets in, guys become arm-weary, mentally weary, by swinging the bat too much.

“I wish they’d play with their gloves a little more often. I think there is this residual effect in a positive way offensively by not swinging so much. I do, I believe playing more defense and playing different positions can help a young player become a better offensive player.”

Even before he became a manager and created the “Zorilla” phenomenon with Zobrist in Tampa, as a coach in Anaheim, Maddon’s fingerprints were all over the versatility of Tony Phillips, Mark McLemore and Chone Figgins.

“The players have to be able to do those things,” Maddon says. “Not everybody can play those positions well. I think that’s the greater requirement as opposed to worrying about their hitting, it’s can they do that on defense? If they can’t, then you don’t do that.”

As Maddon points out, from a manager’s perspective, it is far easier to do this with a younger player on the way up than with a veteran. It becomes difficult to teach an old dog new tricks, right? In this vein, Bryant, 24, and Baez, 23, are perfect. To them, maintaining an array of broken-in gloves for different positions is a perfectly normal way to live an MLB life.

“If you try to get them to do that four years from now it might be difficult,” Maddon concedes. “But if they come in young doing this thing and get it to become part of their fabric and understand how it helps the group, you’ve got something.”

You better believe that other clubs are taking notes. It’s a copycat sport, and who wouldn’t want to emulate the Cubs right now?

Maddon first laid eyes on Baez in Puerto Rico when he visited two winters ago after accepting the Chicago job. He watched Baez make some slick plays in the infield and immediately knew that the Cubs would be a better team with Baez around.

This October, everyone is seeing that. He smashed a key home run against San Francisco and made several highlight-reel plays in the field during the division series. Against the Dodgers in Game 1 of this NL Championship Series, he created a run all by himself with a hustle double, a dash to third on a wild pitch and then a breathtaking steal of home. In Game 2, he alertly let a line drive skip on the ground in front of him, instead of catching it, to start a double play.

“He’s just a unique talent,” Maddon says, noting that it is only a select few players who possess it in any sport, like Magic Johnson, one of the Dodgers’ owners and the former NBA great.

“Some of your greater running backs,” he continues. “They just have this vision. They see things. He sees things. And that’s why he’s so good.”

It’s also why it will be so difficult for rival clubs to duplicate what the Cubs have right now. It is an exquisitely rare mix of vision, talent, unselfishness and a willingness by all to do things for the good of the team.

“There are so many guys in the league who could do it if they put their mind to it,” says Zobrist, one of the pioneers of the trade. “But some guys don’t.” 

Among other things, Zobrist says, versatility not only helps the team, it can improve a player’s individual stock. Case in point: himself.

“Teams were looking at me not just as a second baseman or outfielder, but both,” says Zobrist, who emerged as one of the more desired players on the market last winter. “So several different teams were talking to me, saying we want you to do this or we want you to do this. They were putting offers on the table for various positions.

“If that opens up your opportunities, that’s what’s going to enable guys to make more money in free agency, too.”

So far, it has worked wonders for Bryant.

“I feel like it kind of keeps me on my toes in terms of moving around,” Bryant says. “It keeps you fresh at third base. I feel like this game is so monotonous, it’s the same thing over and over every day. So I feel like for me to move around to left field, third base, first base, right field, it kind of makes me wake up a little bit.”

“It’s a great model,” the Padres’ Green says. “Joe’s proven to be a trendsetter in the game in recent years. He was shifting before anybody else was shifting. You look back 20, 30 years at the way Tony La Russa managed the bullpen; now everybody is using their bullpen that way.

“Now, moving guys around the diamond, if you have the pieces to do that, it’s a concept I wouldn’t shy away from at all. But until you get that caliber of athlete all over the diamond where you’ve got a Javy Baez and a Ben Zobrist and a Kris Bryant, the rest of us are just pretending.”

Scott Miller covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report. Follow Scott on Twitter and talk baseball.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

CHICAGO — Here came the manager. Out of the corner of his eye, from his spot behind home plate, Los Angeles Dodgers catcher Yasmani Grandal spied Dave Roberts come up the dugout steps and out onto the Wrigley Field grass. He was on his way toward the mound.

So Grandal followed his instincts. He headed to the mound himself, jogging briskly, one goal in mind: get to Clayton Kershaw before Roberts did.

There were two out, one on, bottom of the seventh and the Dodgers were in Code Red. They led 1-0, but it was a fragile 1-0, and how much more was fair to ask of Kershaw, anyway?

In the Chicago Cubs’ on-deck circle, Javier Baez was swinging his big bat, ready to author another chapter in his ongoing best-seller of an October.

“No way you’re coming out of this game,” Grandal told Kershaw.

The catcher was assessing things as this contest rolled along, and right here, right now, with the Dodgers ace at only 82 pitches and his slider still wicked, Grandal knew Kershaw had more to give.

“Has Doc signaled to the bullpen?” asked Kershaw, who hadn’t seen Roberts when he first emerged from the dugout.

“No,” Grandal said. “He hasn’t.”

It was right about then that Roberts’ cleats crunched into the dirt on the mound, signaling his arrival, and the discussion began. “I can get Baez,” Kershaw told his manager. He was adamant: “I can get him.”

The discussion was brief. Roberts turned around and headed back to the dugout.

Two pitches and one stomach-dropping moment later, Joc Pederson had hauled in Baez’s drive to the deepest part of center field. Kenley Jansen entered for a drama-free six-out save, and the Dodgers carefully packed their 1-0 victory and a dead-even National League Championship Series for the flight home to Los Angeles and Game 3 on Tuesday night.

To watch them lean on Kershaw is to wonder how much more weight his creaky back can take before it starts screaming in rebellion.

Yet to see Kershaw respond the way so few others are capable of responding—Madison Bumgarner, and then who?—is to have an up-close view of another of nature’s wonders.

Four times over the past 10 days, the Dodgers had handed him the ball and asked him to keep their World Series hopes alive. There was his Game 1 start against the Washington Nationals in the division series on Oct. 7. There was his short-rest, do-or-die start in Game 4 against Washington on Oct. 11. There was his dramatic Game 5 entrance as a closer two days after that.

And then there was Sunday night in Wrigley Field.

Kershaw’s biggest concern going in was one that is endemic to every single starting pitcher in the game: As much as he wanted the ball Thursday in Washington, he wondered how the abnormal schedule might affect him in Game 2 in Chicago.

“My last seven or eight days have been a little different, so just kind of going into the unexpected,” he said. “That was more of my concern than workload or anything like that.”

His previous October frustrations have been examined to the point the Dodgers have a hair trigger when the subject comes up. They are quick to point out that his postseason numbers coming into this October, 2-6 with a 4.59 ERA in 13 appearances (10 starts), are skewed and not all his fault.

Many of the numbers confirm that as truth. In particular, the bullpen has betrayed him over the years to a horrific degree; of the 15 baserunners the bullpen has inherited from Kershaw over his postseason starts, it has allowed eight to score. A grand total of 53 percent. And as August Fagerstrom pointed out in an excellent FanGraphs study, Kershaw has been charged with 41 earned runs in his postseason career, and he was sitting in the dugout when 20 percent of those scored.

“I’ve never bought into the narrative,” Andrew Friedman, the Dodgers’ president of baseball operations, said in a happy clubhouse. “There’s no other pitcher I’d rather have on the mound, whether it’s February, March, May, October or November.”

When he arrived on the mound on an unusually warm October evening, it didn’t take long for Roberts to concur with Friedman.

Kershaw made his case—strongly. The manager listened.

“I had every intent to go out there and get him and go to Kenley,” Roberts said. “But as I went out there, looked him in the eye and [saw] the confidence Clayton had to get the hitter, I just went with my gut and said, ‘We can get this guy.’

“And at that point in time, that’s all I needed to hear.”

The seventh had started with a four-pitch walk to Cubs slugger Anthony Rizzo, who has been quiet enough this postseason that Chicago is beginning to get concerned. But then Kershaw froze Ben Zobrist with a 93 mph fastball for a called third strike and then induced a pop to left field from Addison Russell, another Cub whose bat has gone silent.

On the second pitch after the meeting, Baez sunk his teeth into another 93 mph fastball so savagely that Kershaw thought it was curtains.

“I did,” he said. “I thought it was out for sure. He hit it pretty good.

“And yeah, after Dave came out and I kind of talked my way into it, he probably was not going to trust me again after that.”

From his vantage point at second base, Chase Utley did not think the ball was going out. But he did think it was going over Pederson’s head, which would have given Rizzo plenty of time to score from first, tie the game and then, yes, ruin another of Kershaw’s October nights.

In the stands, Friedman did not think the ball was going out because of its trajectory. But as he talked in the clubhouse afterward, he paused at one point mid-sentence. He was staring at the clubhouse flat-screen television, which was showing the highlights of the just-completed game.

“Sorry,” Friedman said. “I was watching Baez—that just scared me again.”

If the rest of this series is scripted anything like these first two games, it would not be the last time Friedman, Kershaw, Cubs manager Joe Maddon or anyone else finds their hearts skipping a few beats. Over two nights in Chicago, as the Cubs chase their first World Series title in 108 years and the Dodgers gun for their first Fall Classic appearance in 28 years, every pitch has mattered. Every inning has been taut. Every strategic decision is dissected.

Well aware of Kershaw’s recent workload and knowing how hard the Dodgers are leaning on him, the Cubs were curious to see just how well he would hold up in Game 2. Specifically, before the game, Maddon had cited his velocity and location, two telltale signs as to whether he was fatigued.

“It became apparent that he did not want to throw his curveball, I thought, and that the slider was just hit or miss for him,” Maddon said. “He pitched with his fastball, and he pitched to good spots.”

He mowed down the first 14 Cubs in order, with Baez finally breaking the perfect game with a base hit in the fifth. There wasn’t much room for error for Kershaw—Adrian Gonzalez’s solo homer in the second provided the slim margin—but that’s all he needed.

“It’s fun when you win, so yeah, I’m enjoying it right now,” Kershaw said. “When you’re in the moment, you’re just trying to constantly stop runs, preventing runs.”

That he’s done in October—and at the most opportune times. Plus, he’s done it while breaking in a new catcher, Grandal, after the club traded away his favorite catcher, A.J. Ellis, in August.

Grandal noted that in their previous couple of games together, they changed signs a few times and were adjusting to each other. On Sunday night, there was none of that.

“We got it going,” the catcher noted, adding that in that meeting on the mound, everybody, including the infielders, was on the same page about Kershaw remaining in the game.

You can say whatever you want about Kershaw’s previous Octobers, his postseason numbers and anything else, but the ace remains to these Dodgers what the sun is to Los Angeles.

“Being around here the past two years, seeing how he prepares, knowing what kind of competitor he is, looking ahead, I have more confidence in him than anybody in baseball,” Friedman said.

As for what Kershaw has crammed into these past 10 days, Friedman just shook his head.

“It should surprise me, but it doesn’t,” he said. “I feel like I’m being too flippant about it.”

In the manager’s office, the feeling is the same.

“I’ve said it time and time again: He’s the best pitcher on the planet,” Roberts said. “I’ll take him any day. As would 29 other managers.”

Scott Miller covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report. All quotes obtained firsthand unless otherwise noted.

Follow Scott on Twitter and talk baseball.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

CHICAGO — Holy cow, as Harry Caray surely would have said.

Holy crap, as the Los Angeles Dodgers may as well have said late Saturday night.

The Cubs took the Dodgers’ best punch as the curtain opened on this National League Championship Series and came roaring back anyway. Easy, peasy. The Dodgers trailed, tied it and were ohsoclose to seizing Game 1 with Clayton Kershaw set to start Game 2—and wouldn’t that have been something, a real possibility of sticking the Cubs in a two-game hole heading back to Los Angeles?

And then came the freeway pileup.

“It stings a little bit, absolutely,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said.

All across the postseason landscape this autumn, from Baltimore to Cleveland to Washington to Los Angeles, these playoffs have been about matchups and craziness and creativity. As the Cubs put up a five-spot in the bottom of the eighth to hang an 8-4 collar on the Dodgers in a Wrigley Field housequake on a rocking Saturday night, these two teams took even that to another level.

“Holy s–t, I almost passed out,” Cubs assistant hitting coach Eric Hinske said to nobody in particular as the coaches came clomping in from the field, through the tunnel, toward their office afterward.

“Just doing what we do,” said Javier Baez, who has moved to the top of the charts with a bullet as the Most Entertaining Player in All of Baseball these days, of teammate Miguel Montero’s pinch-hit, bottom-of-the-eighth grand slam against Dodgers reliever Joe Blanton.

“I think anybody in our lineup can change the game with one swing.”

So much happened, with so much more still to come in this series. Baez swiped home plate in the second inning, becoming the first Cub to steal home in a postseason game since 1907. Wrigley Field wouldn’t even open for another seven years after that.

Cubs manager Joe Maddon hooked starter Jon Lester after only six innings and 77 pitches, with a 3-1 lead that melted away two innings later and opened the door to all kinds of loud second-guessing. Then he summoned closer Aroldis Chapman with the heat on in the eighth inning for what was going to be another six-out save.

“It was an aggressive move by Joe,” Roberts said.

Except, it never got that far for two reasons: One, Adrian Gonzalez belted a two-out, game-tying single against Chapman; and two, Roberts ordered two intentional walks in the bottom of the eighth inning while hunting matchups—the second one loading the bases and designed to force the Cubs to pinch hit for Chapman.

They did. With Montero.

“That was strange,” Cubs third baseman Kris Bryant said of the two free passes to load the bases. “I was kind of lost there.”

“I hadn’t seen that,” Cubs catcher David Ross said. “I’ve never seen it. But he was trying to find a matchup, and that’s the cat-and-mouse game between the managers.”

Know who had seen something similar? Ben Zobrist. Big shock, that came back when he was playing for Tampa Bay and his manager was, yes, Joe Maddon. Zobrist quickly cited the time the Rays were playing the Texas Rangers back during Josh Hamilton’s MVP days and Maddon ordered Hamilton walked with the bases loaded.

So while there’s precedent for just about everything in this crazy game, still. Let’s be real. It took Zobrist a minute to come up with the Hamilton example, and in that time he said he thought even the Dodgers’ players were wondering what was going on.

He had started the trouble by greeting Blanton with a double to start the inning. Two batters later, with one out and first base open, the Dodgers elected to intentionally walk Jason Heyward, who has struggled with the bat all year, to set up a double play.

Understandable, even if it meant pitching to Baez. He flied to right, and there were two outs with Chris Coghlan approaching. That’s when the four fingers came out again from the dugout. Walking Coghlan would bring Chapman to the plate, and in a 3-3 game, that would mean lifting Chapman for a pinch hitter, which would improve the Dodgers’ chances of scoring and winning the game in the ninth inning.

But only if they could get out of the eighth.

At second base, as Blanton was throwing the four balls to Coghlan, Los Angeles’ Chase Utley engaged Zobrist in a quick conversation.

“Is Montero hurt?” Utley asked, thinking perhaps Roberts had some intelligence few others had.

Nope, Zobrist said as both players tried to think along with their managers.

Ross already has tried doing that with Maddon. But it made his head hurt too much.

“I stopped last year,” he quipped. “I didn’t know if it was me thinking along with Joe or the foul balls to the mask.”

This game, it was like a stuffed-crust pizza. The basics were delicious enough. But OK, fine, go ahead and splurge.

It even started early in the day, when Roberts decided he wanted both Howie Kendrick and Enrique Hernandez in the lineup. Hernandez wasn’t even on the Los Angeles roster in the NLDS, but he was added Saturday because in Lester’s first start against the Dodgers this year, Hernandez walloped his second pitch for a home run. Being that it was the only run Lester allowed Los Angeles in 15 innings this year, of course the Dodgers wanted him in the lineup.

Being that Kendrick and Hernandez both play second base and the outfield, Roberts texted the veteran, Kendrick, earlier in the day and asked which he preferred.

“Left field,” Kendrick texted back.

Two batters into the bottom of the first, following Dexter Fowler’s leadoff single, Bryant laced a long fly to left that Kendrick simply didn’t get back on in time. It banged off the ivy-covered wall for an RBI double.

Then the Cubs scored two more in the second—the second run being Baez’s steal of home. The play actually was a safety-squeeze bunt with Lester at the plate, but Baez strayed too far from third, catcher Carlos Ruiz threw and Baez broke for the plate. Ruiz’s throw was off line, and Justin Turner couldn’t redirect it home in time to catch Baez.

“Definitely not the way we drew it up,” Bryant said. “But Javy’s a playmaker. He seems to find a way.”

Bryant noted Ruiz’s poor throw, said his thanks that Baez didn’t get hurt on the play and noted, “Javy doing crazy things out there…that’s just what we do.”

“Just what we do.” You heard that over and over in the Cubs clubhouse, the home of a supremely confident team that is growing more bold and more confident as each day passes in this postseason. Chicago survived San Francisco, stared down a potential disaster Saturday and keeps on rolling.

Maddon has preached all season to embrace the expectations, and the Cubs certainly are. Maybe the billy goats and black cats appeared at times in the past, but as the T-shirt worn last week by celebrity fan Bill Murray read, “I ain’t afraid of no goat.”

When Montero’s grand slam blasted into the night, it was party time again.

Baez was in the video room behind the dugout at the time, quickly studying his latest at-bat.

“I think I busted, like, three chairs,” Baez said of his mad scramble back into the dugout. “Everybody was going crazy, man. We needed that run bad.”

By then, Lester was long gone.

“I just thought that tonight Jon really wasn’t on top of his game,” Maddon said of his starter, who allowed just one run and four hits but several loud outs in six innings, adding: “If Jon was on top of his game, I may not have done it [pinch hit for him in the sixth], but I didn’t think he had his best stuff tonight.”

Roberts, meanwhile, said he would sleep well despite the loss.

“As long as you think things through and put guys in the best position to have success on your team, a chance to win, you can do the right things, but they can’t always work out,” Roberts said.

So score another one for the Cubs, who keep figuring out ways to make things work out for themselves.

Maddon echoed Roberts, speaking of Chapman’s blown save despite fanning Corey Seager and Yasiel Puig before Gonzalez’s game-tying single: “Because it didn’t work out doesn’t mean it was wrong.”

Yeah, this thing is going to be fun over the next several days. And the Cubs, well, they’ve already exceeded what they did in last year’s NLCS against the Mets: They’ve won a game.

“Something about the playoffs,” Bryant said. “You see things you normally don’t see. Sure, it’s stressful sometimes. You’re heart beats a little faster.”

Tick, tick, tick. It sure does. And after the Cubs escaped this one, Chicago’s heart is beating a little faster as it heads toward Kershaw on Sunday night.

Scott Miller covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report. All quotes obtained firsthand unless otherwise noted.

Follow Scott on Twitter and talk baseball.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

WASHINGTON — Scorecards were savaged. Heads were spinning. Benches and bullpens were dwindling.

And that was all well before Clayton Kershaw talked his way into the ninth inning of the most backward, brilliant, incredible, pulsating, unusual and exhausting game the Los Angeles Dodgers may have ever created.

“No, no; never in my wildest dreams,” Dodgers pitching coach Rick Honeycutt said—champagne splashing, Chicago Cubs awaiting—when asked whether he’s ever seen anything like it.

It was Los Angeles 4, Washington 3, Conventional Baseball 0 in Game 5 of the National League Division Series: a game that went off the rails by, oh, the third inning and dared go where few other postseason games have gone by the ninth.

“This piece. That piece. Whatever,” Honeycutt said. “You talk about it, you think Rich [Hill] is going to go through the lineup twice and then he’s going to be finished.”

And then the Dodgers presumably had an entire binder full of matchup scenarios, except…

“It just didn’t happen that way,” explained Honeycutt, who still wasn’t quite sure what hit him.

The Dodgers used one of their key late-inning setup men, Joe Blanton, in the third inning.

They called their closer, Kenley Jansen, into a five-alarm fire in the seventh inning, three batters in, one runner on, nobody out.

They pulled Kershaw out of their hat three batters into the ninth inning to get the final two outs. Kershaw had not pitched in relief since 2009, had never before obtained a major league save and had just thrown 110 high-stress pitches 48 hours earlier to push this thing back to Washington and Game 5.

“Crazy,” Dodgers third baseman Justin Turner said. “It was crazy. I didn’t even know Kersh was down there in the bullpen warming up until Kenley walked a guy in the ninth, and I looked up and saw his name on the scoreboard.

“I can’t even digest what happened. It was an unbelievable game all the way through.”

The artist who kept drawing and redrawing all of this in the dugout was a rookie manager who couldn’t even get an interview with the lowly San Diego Padres last winter before the enlightened Dodgers opened their doors.

Yeah, same guy who, seven hours earlier on this unforgettable night, declared that Kershaw was “absolutely not” available for Game 5, not even for one out.

Holding a half-empty bottle of champagne, his uniform sopping wet and wearing the grin of a cat burglar in the clear when it was over, manager Dave Roberts now could be called either a fibber or a trendsetter.

Given his magic touch on this night, there isn’t much question as to which is the correct answer. Using his best reliever in the highest leverage spot of a win-or-go-home game…imagine that. What guts, what onions, what…smarts.

“That was the most creative inning I’ve ever seen,” Tim Hyers, the Dodgers’ assistant hitting coach, told Roberts of, well, hell, pick an inning, while delivering a heartfelt hug. “It was a pleasure to watch you work.”

Talk about turning convention on its ear: Hill, the Dodgers starter, threw a total of 55 pitches. Jansen, their traditional closer, threw 51.

By the end of the seventh inning, Roberts had burned through every single one of his six bench players, save one: Yasiel Puig.

Oh yeah, that seventh. That will be carefully placed into a time capsule from 2016 in Los Angeles, right there beside Vin Scully’s final words and the Nationals’ final rites. That’s when, during this pinch-hitting spree, the Dodgers popped for four runs to erase a 1-0 deficit.

Max Scherzer was sailing, buoyed by a run in the second inning. But he had little margin for error, and that completely blew apart when Joc Pederson deposited Scherzer’s first pitch in the top of the seventh over the left field wall for an opposite-field, game-tying home run.

Scherzer’s wall of dominance now cracked, all of manager Dusty Baker’s horses and all of Dusty’s relievers couldn’t put things back together again. During one stretch in the seventh and eighth innings, Baker used seven different pitchers during a span of 11 Dodgers hitters.

No wonder the blasted, flawed and yet beautiful inning took 66 minutes to complete. With the Dodgers ahead 4-1, Los Angeles reliever Grant Dayton started the bottom of the seventh by walking light-hitting Danny Espinosa on four pitches and then surrendering a stunning pinch-hit home run to Chris Heisey.

Their lead reduced to 4-3—the Nationals lineup now rolled over to the top of the order—and Roberts was not about to wait. Here came Jansen with nine outs standing between Los Angeles and a date with the Cubs beginning Saturday night in Chicago.

Roberts had talked with Jansen before the game, in the clubhouse, and told him, “Be ready. I may need you in the seventh tonight.”

Jansen was all ears and all in.

“I’ve never done that in my whole career,” Jansen, 29, a converted catcher who once caught Kershaw back in rookie ball in the Dodgers’ organization, said proudly. “I never went three innings in a game and 51 pitches.”

He admitted, once his pitch count zoomed up toward 40, “it’s a different feeling. You feel a little tired. My whole body was fatigued. But I’m not gonna quit.”

Even having been told to be ready, things moved quickly. Once Heisey’s ball sailed over the fence and the next batter, Clint Robinson, drilled a single to put the tying run on base, Jansen entered with a purpose: “Try to stop the bleeding,” he said.

He got Trea Turner to fly to right, watched Bryce Harper serve a single the other way into left field and then struck out Jayson Werth for a second out. But Harper had stolen second, and the Dodgers elected to intentionally walk Washington’s hottest hitter, Daniel Murphy. Jansen then fanned Anthony Rendon to end the inning.

When Jansen trotted out for the eighth, the Dodgers clinging to a 4-3 lead and six outs from booking their trip to Wrigley Field, it was clear this would be a race to the finish line.

Everyone—from the Dodgers dugout to the 49,936 now in agony in Nationals Park to a national television audience and on Twitter—was riveted by Jansen’s workload.

“Sure, I mean, jeez, we’re in uncharted territory here for lots of guys,” Honeycutt said.

But one person paying close attention was far, far more important than everyone else combined.

In the dugout, as soon as Jansen headed for the mound to start the eighth, Kershaw approached Honeycutt.

“Are you expecting Kenley to go all three innings?” Kershaw asked.

“Well, that’s what we’re shooting for,” Honeycutt replied.

The ace left-hander told Honeycutt he could pitch if needed.

“No, no, no, no,” Honeycutt answered.

By the time the final “no” hung in the air, Kershaw was long gone, having scooted further down the dugout to approach the manager.

“Are you expecting Kenley to go all three innings?” Kershaw wanted to know.

Yes, Roberts answered, that’s the hope.

I can pitch, Kershaw said.

“No,” Honeycutt saw Roberts tell him.

“Next thing I knew, he had his cleats on and was heading for the bullpen,” Honeycutt said.

Of all the dozens and dozens of scenarios the Dodgers game-planned for during meetings leading up to Game 5 involving Roberts, President of Baseball Operations Andrew Friedman and any number of others, there was one scenario that never came up.

“It wasn’t even ‘No way, no chance,'” Friedman said. “We didn’t even talk about it.”

Kershaw, though, was insistent. So Roberts had a quick talk with the training staff, got clearance and told Kershaw to go ahead and get loose.

The new, on-the-fly plan: If Jansen couldn’t get a 1-2-3 inning, Kershaw would come in to face the fourth hitter of the inning—the uber-hot, left-handed-swinging Murphy.

In the tunnel behind the Dodgers dugout as they hit in the top of the ninth, Jansen looked up at a television, saw Kershaw warming in the bullpen and was stunned.

“I thought I was dreaming out there,” Jansen said, adding “Kershaw gave me an extra boost of adrenalin going out there in the ninth.”

How far-fetched was all of this when Kershaw began his public walk from the dugout to the Dodgers bullpen behind the left field fence just before the ninth inning started?

“I thought it was a decoy,” Friedman said. “But knowing Kersh, I knew it wasn’t.”

And so it was, 12:35 a.m. ET when Roberts summoned Kershaw with one out, the Dodgers clinging to a 4-3 lead and Nationals on the bases at first and second.

“I gave everything I’ve got,” Jansen said. Toward the end, he admitted, he was so tired that it felt like the strike zone “was shrinking.”

Kershaw did what few of his teammates this year (Murphy was hitting .462/.529/.462 in the first four games of this series) and few Cubs did last year (he hit .529/.556/1.294 in the NLCS) were able to do: He induced Murphy to pop harmlessly to second base.

Then, in a complete mismatch, Kershaw fanned poor Wilmer Difo, who was batting for the pitcher and was the last man left on Baker’s bench.

The way Kershaw reasoned it, Thursday was his normal day to throw a session in the bullpen after his start two days earlier, anyway, so why wouldn’t he just skip that in case he was needed in the game?

“You know, at the end of the day, if we don’t win that game, we’re going home anyway, so what does it matter?” Kershaw said. “As far as an easy sell or not an easy sell, I think Doc was initially hesitant, for sure. But I don’t know, medium sell I guess.”

Kershaw sure didn’t need to sell himself to his teammates, but nevertheless, sell he did. As if their opinion of him could go any higher. When someone started to ask Honeycutt whether this would mitigate some of the ace’s previous postseason struggles, the pitching coach warned, “Don’t even go there.”

“He’s had a couple of [postseason] innings that have gone haywire,” Honeycutt said. “That’s what happens. He’s still the best. You want him out there no matter what.”

This one, as Turner said, is going to take a while to digest.

“The significance of this game is kind of lost on me in the moment,” Friedman said. “It was as intense of a game as I’ve ever been a part of.”

And the levers were pulled, expertly, by a rookie manager who looked for all the world like a guy who has been doing this for years.

“You have a plan, but things just changed in a heartbeat, really,” Honeycutt said. “[Roberts] has a great intuition for this. He [intentionally] walked Murphy in the third and boom. He wants Blanton, boom.

“Each piece, he’s able to piece it together.”

Once it was whole, it was a sight to behold. If you could see it through all of the scribbling, scratching out and rewriting on your scorecard.

Afterward, Roberts deflected the praise to his players and coaches, and he spoke of his collaboration with the front office, the way it tries to stay “forward-thinking” and “open-minded.”

Because of that, the Dodgers have much to look forward to over the next 10 days or so with the Cubs.

“I’d be interested to see, you know, they won the war, but to see the effects of Jansen and Kershaw when they get to Chicago,” Baker, the Nationals manager, said.

That will be a different story for a different day and, yes, you can bet Baker will have company in watching how the rest of this October unfolds for the Dodgers.

But as they threw convention to the wind on a chilly, windy evening in the nation’s capital, the Dodgers knew one thing for sure: There are different ways of doing things, and they’ll be damned if they’re going to continue doing them just because that’s the way those things have always been done.

Scott Miller covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report. All quotes obtained firsthand unless otherwise noted.

Follow Scott on Twitter and talk baseball.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

One out from clinching the Astros’ first World Series berth in Game 5 of the 2005 National League Championship Series, Brad Lidge threw a slider that didn’t quite slide in Houston. At the plate, the Cardinals’ Albert Pujols launched a three-run, go-ahead homer that sent the series back to St. Louis.

As the Astros boarded their charter flight the next day, still leading the NLCS 3-2, catcher Brad Ausmus asked Houston traveling secretary Barry Waters to tell the pilot to deliver an unusual message over the PA system once the aircraft reached 30,000 feet.

The pilot blanched, then balked.

Frustrated, Ausmus took matters into his own hands, approaching the cockpit and telling the pilot: “Listen, just say it. If there are any problems, I’ll deal with it.”

And so, sure enough, when the charter flight reached its desired cruising altitude, the PA crackled to life, and the Astros listened to their pilot announce:

“We’ve reached 30,000 feet, and if you look out the windows to the left, you can see the baseball Albert Pujols hit last night still in full flight.”

Dead. Silence.

Then uproarious laughter.

Tension. Broken.

“Put it this way,” Lidge, now an analyst for MLB Network Radio, told Bleacher Report during a recent phone conversation. “We’re talking about this because this is such an important aspect of what happened: If you don’t have teammates who love you…I could have been sitting there stewing in my own anger for a long time.

“But as soon as that’s said, at first I remember for about 30 seconds I was so pissed off at the pilot, I was about to run up and choke him. Then I thought about it, I realized it was Ausmus [who put him up to it], and I exhaled for the first time. I realized these guys had my back.”

Blown late-inning leads have been a part of baseball since the first ninth-inning comeback more than a century ago.

The rise and fall of closers in the age of bullpen specialization and in front of national-television audiences and scathing social media critics, seemingly, has been going on for just about as long.

And as surely as you wolf down the leftover Halloween candy at home, it happens every October.

On that grand postseason stage, there is absolutely, positively no overexaggerating the agony, shock, misery, despair, depression and sheer volume of atmospheric pressure that accompanies a blown save.

You think the baggage of letting down a guy’s entire team, manager, coaching staff, friends, fanbase, city, state and acquaintances simply remains at sea level? Think again.

Not every team is as lucky as those Astros, who can look back fondly on those heartbreaking losses with the knowledge they eventually won that series in six games to get to the World Series.

Baltimore manager Buck Showalter and starter-turned-reliever Ubaldo Jimenez will not have that chance after losing this year’s AL Wild Card Game to Toronto. Showalter instead has the winter to think about leaving closer Zach Britton on ice in the bullpen, while for Jimenez, there will be no game in which to atone for the mess he created until next April. 

Nor will there be for San Francisco’s Derek Law, Javier Lopez, Sergio Romo and Will Smith, all of whom have fingerprints on the Giants’ stunning ninth-inning collapse Tuesday night against the Chicago Cubs.

Dennis Eckersley was still answering questions about surrendering Kirk Gibson’s 1988 Game 1 World Series home run all the way to his Hall of Fame induction in 2004. Neftali Feliz declined to answer questions after blowing Game 6 of the 2011 World Series after he and his Texas Rangers were just one strike from clinching what would have been their first World Series title.

Even the greatest closer ever, New York’s Mariano Rivera, has three epic October disasters mixed in among his five World Series rings: Game 7 of the 2001 World Series against Arizona, Games 4 and 5 of a historic 2004 ALCS loss to Boston and Game 4 of the ALDS against Cleveland in 1997.

The psychological toll has turned sad, and even tragic, in some cases. Atlanta’s Mark Wohlers, an All-Star in 1996, was beaten in Game 4 of that year’s World Series against the New York Yankees by a Jim Leyritz home run. Two years later, he lost his command of the strike zone, and his career disintegrated. Philadelphia’s Mitch Williams famously yielded Joe Carter’s Game 6 homer in the 1993 World Series in Toronto and was out of baseball soon thereafter.

And three years after moving to within one strike of pitching the Angels into the World Series in 1986, closer Donnie Moore committed suicide, still haunted by his October failure, his agent said at the time.

“Ever since he gave up the home run to Dave Henderson, he was never himself again,” Dave Pinter, Moore’s agent of 12 years, told Elliott Almond and Mike Penner of the Los Angeles Times after Moore’s death in 1989. “He blamed himself for the Angels not going to the World Series. He constantly talked about the Henderson home run.”

The tragedy of Moore and the laughter on that Houston flight are extremes for closers who go through the meat grinder that is October.

Most who fail on a given night find the experience somewhere between agonizing and uncomfortable, though few situations are as excruciating as what Arizona’s Byung-Hyun Kim went through in 2001.

With the Diamondbacks leading New York in the World Series 2-1, Kim surrendered a bottom-of-the-ninth, game-tying, two-run home run to Tino Martinez in Game 4 at Yankee Stadium. Then, in the bottom of the 10th, Derek Jeter smashed a walk-off homer against Kim.

The very next night, with Arizona leading 2-0 into the bottom of the ninth, Kim served up a stunning, game-tying home run to Scott Brosius in a game the Diamondbacks would lose in the 12th inning.

Bronx lightning blasted Kim three times in 24 hours.

Anybody in Yankee Stadium or watching on television those nights will never forget it.

“It was just, boy, that was a tough one, I wish we wouldn’t have lost that game, but it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, God, the series is over, we’re gagging this,'” Arizona television analyst Bob Brenly, the Diamondbacks manager in that World Series, told Bleacher Report. “That never entered my mind, and I don’t think it ever entered any of the players’ minds, either.”

There is no all-encompassing blueprint regarding how to cope with a blown save, and that extends to the manager’s office. Brenly, in hindsight, learned something about how to set a tone following Jeter’s Game 4 home run. 

“I probably didn’t do things to help matters much in New York,” Brenly said. “I was pissed at Jeter’s home run because it went [something like] 218 feet. It would have been a routine fly ball in any other ballpark.”

As the players started undressing following the difficult loss, they could hear Brenly cussing in the manager’s office.

“It kept coming at me in waves,” Brenly said. “I can’t believe that ball got out of here! It was a routine fly ball! I started kicking things.”

It was then that veteran infielder Jay Bell popped into Brenly‘s office, and the manager realized his players might think he was blaming them. So he quickly stepped into the middle of the clubhouse to say a few words and “let the guys know this has nothing to do with them, and it’s got everything to do with this ballpark.”

“We weren’t happy, either,” Mark Grace, the first baseman on that team, said. “Nobody was happy. Bob’s a guy that when he’s pissed off, he likes to throw s–t. Jay’s more of a kinder, gentler, dadgummit kind of guy. But they’re still great competitors. Just different. I had no problem with any of that.”

The next night, in the ninth inning of Game 5, there was nothing cheap about Brosius‘ home run. It was stunning, given what had happened to Kim just 24 hours earlier.

“This guy threw the ball every day,” Brenly said, still wincing at what Kim had to endure. “We caught him in the shower one day earlier in the season, naked, going through his pitching motion. We had to tell the bat boys and the ball boys, ‘Don’t play catch with him anymore.’ He’d take them out behind the outfield fence. He was always, always throwing.

“His resiliency was never an issue. I had no problem pitching him three days in a row.”

By the time Brosius‘ ball left Yankee Stadium in Game 5, though, Kim’s season was finished, and his psyche was shattered.

Grace and Arizona shortstop Tony Womack reached the mound about the same time, just before catcher Rod Barajas, and practically before Brosius‘ home run crash-landed into the old Yankee Stadium seats. Tenderly, Grace cradled Kim’s head with a hand.

“When you saw the devastation that happened to that young man, all of a sudden, at least for a little while, the game was no longer important,” Grace said. “The human being was more important than the game.

“At that moment, a young man was on the mound devastated, a very proud young Korean man trying to do his country proud and everyone else proud.”

Kim spoke very little English, mostly needing an interpreter to communicate even with his teammates that season. What Grace did with his body language, though, was universal.

“It was more, ‘Hey, man, the game’s not over, it’s just tied. It’s OK,'” Grace said, before adding with a chuckle: “I probably also said, ‘Will you stop giving up home runs, for Chrissake?’

“I think he understood, in so many words, that I’m letting him know we’re still in your corner, we still believe in you. But he was so done at that time that I could have told him there was a party at my house and he wouldn’t have cared.”

Through an interpreter that night, Kim let Brenly know that he felt he had let the team down and disappointed everybody. Back through the interpreter, Brenly told Kim that the pitcher had earned the right to have a bad night or two, that the team would not be in the World Series without him and to be ready for the next time.

Of course, there would be no next time. Not in 2001, at least. Arizona went on to win Games 6 and 7, but Kim, wrecked, did not pitch. In fact, Hall of Famer Randy Johnson, after starting and throwing seven innings in Game 6, came back the next night on no rest and finished the game, working 1.1 innings while Kim looked on.

“I was real proud of the way the guys on the team handled it,” Brenly said of Kim’s Game 5 blowup. “Gracey going to the mound, Barajas getting to the mound quickly. You know, they really rallied around him at that moment out on the mound, in front of everybody.

Circumstances. They seem to ambush closers often in the Bronx in October. Or, at least, in old Yankee Stadium.

In 2009, the Minnesota Twins had a core of young players who were sure they could take down the Yankees. Then, after losing Game 1 of the ALDS, they took a 3-1 lead into the ninth inning of Game 2 when closer Joe Nathan surrendered a leadoff single to Mark Teixeira and a game-tying homer to Alex Rodriguez.

Nathan produced 47 saves that season, and that was the first home run he had allowed all year with a man on base. Twisting the knife, Minnesota’s Joe Mauer had a leadoff double in the 11th inning taken away when umpire Phil Cuzzi ruled that the ball was foul. Replays showed the ball clearly landed in fair territory, except, well, those were the days before replay could reverse calls. The Yankees wound up winning in the bottom of the 11th on a Teixeira home run and closed out the Twins in Game 3.

Seven years later, that moment remains high-def for Nathan, who is now with the San Francisco Giants.

“I fell into a count,” he said of the A-Rod at-bat. “It was a 3-1 count, you’re on the mound and your first thought is that if I walk him, I’m in more trouble, so let’s play the percentages.”

“You feel bad because you think you let your teammates down,” Nathan said, echoing Lidge. “The teams that I’ve been on that have had the most success, the ones where you probably get the most success out of your teammates and yourself, are the teams that you know the guys have your back 100 percent no matter what happens. The times you come out and you know they want you on the hill in that situation when it comes up again.

“As bad as you want to get it done for your teammates for a win, sometimes it’s more important to know they’ve got your back no matter what happens.”

Closers who suffer on the October stage must keep in mind one of former manager Jim Leyland’s favorite phrases: Hey, the other guys drive Cadillacs, too.

Meaning: At this level, everybody is pretty darned good. There is no shame in getting beaten every now and again. It’s going to happen.

Especially when opposing hitters can smell a weakness.

“I think probably, at some level, we felt good about our chances of scoring,” Paul Molitor, the MVP of the 1993 World Series and current Minnesota manager, said of ambushing Williams in a three-run ninth inning that snatched the title away from Philadelphia in ’93. “Mitch had had a great year and was a huge reason why they were where they were. But it wasn’t like he was a guy who had been a top-end closer for seven or eight years.

“It all came together for him that year, and I think we all thought he was a little tired and his velocity was down from what we had heard earlier in the year. And we had come back to beat him earlier [in Toronto’s epic 15-14 Game 4 win], so you kind of feel that we’ve got a chance. And you combine that with the lineup we were running up there against him. It was not so much even Mitch Williams on the mound, it was this is who we are and we have a good chance.

“But I think once you overcome a deficit late against a guy, it certainly gives you more confidence the next time.”

And once those hitters start undressing a closer, well, let’s just say it’s pretty hard to hide when you’re standing on the mound like the emperor with no clothes.

Kim did survive to collect 36 saves for Arizona in 2002, and he wound up pitching in the majors through 2007 for three other organizations. But the overwhelming memory of him is standing, shattered, on that Yankee Stadium mound.

“He’s back in Korea,” Brenly said. “He played a little professional ball there. I don’t know what he’s doing now. We have an alumni game every year. I wouldn’t expect him to jump a plane from Korea back to Phoenix, but it would be nice to see him one year if he felt like coming back.”

Lidge said: “The way things are blown up, they take on a life of their own. That’s what makes closer such a high-risk, high-reward position. I felt the extremes of all sides.”

The Astros won Game 6 of the 2005 NLCS in St. Louis, 5-1, so Lidge’s next appearance after Pujols was not until he faced the Chicago White Sox in Game 2 of the World Series.

There, working the bottom of the ninth in Chicago in a 6-6 game, Lidge served up a one-out home run to Scott Podsednik to suffer another loss. At that point, the Astros became concerned for Lidge’s mental state.

“Honestly, that one didn’t bother me,” Lidge said. “I think the reality of baseball kicked in. He was a left-handed hitter, he had no home runs during the year, it’s a [2-1] count, so of course I’m going to throw him a strike. That one didn’t bother me, honestly.

“I think, too, you have enough baseball knowledge as a player in the game to know when you made a mistake, and that’s when it’s on you.”

Three years later in 2008, having signed with Philadelphia as a free agent, Lidge was perfect, converting 41 of 41 save opportunities during the regular season and seven of seven during the postseason. The last of those came in Game 5 of the World Series as the Phillies won only the second title in club history.

Still remembering the pain of the Pujols homer, Ausmus was watching with a jittery stomach during a getaway trip with his wife to Las Vegas. Relieved, he sent a congratulatory text to his buddy right after the final out.

“I was worried that he had had this perfect season and now he was going to blow that game,” Ausmus said. “But he didn’t. Brad’s one of the better guys I’ve ever played with.”

Maybe that’s why the joke years before about Pujols’ home run being visible outside the windows of the Astros charter flight worked.

Or maybe it was something a little simpler.

“I wasn’t worried about it backfiring,” Ausmus deadpanned. “I was going to laugh at it. I was going to find it funny.”

A decade later, even in the comfort of his own home, October’s late innings still make Lidge sweat.

“Sometimes I’ll be watching a playoff game and things are getting hairy and I’ll tell my wife, ‘I’ve gotta go get some beers to relax,'” Lidge said. “I think, honestly, and I’ve talked to other closers about this—Trevor Hoffman, Eck—they say there’s a fraternity of closers, if you’re lucky enough to be in that position, you’re going to have ones that don’t go right. We’re all going to feel for each other.

“The rest of my life, I will understand what it’s like to be in that situation. And fortunately, I’ll be able to feel the joy of success and the other side forever.”

In his office at home hang two enlarged, framed pictures. One shows him in the aftermath of Pujols’ crushing home run in ’05, while the other features him triumphant on the field as the Phillies rush out to celebrate their World Series title.

Sometimes, when the moment is right, he will point out the photos to his 11-year-old daughter Avery and his seven-year-old son Rowan.

“Hey,” he tells them. “Sometimes in life, you’re going to face challenges. And when you do, you can come out on the other side better for it.”

Picture—and pitcher—perfect.

Scott Miller covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

Follow Scott on Twitter and talk baseball.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

It’s October! Let’s all go down to the pumpkin patch and see which appears first, the Great Pumpkin or Zach Britton…

1. Standing in the Shadows of October

They’ve won Cy Young awards. They’re earning hundreds of millions of dollars.

But will Boston’s David Price and Los Angeles’ Clayton Kershaw dominate in one of these postseasons the way they’ve dominated in the regular season?

The spotlight will burn hotter on these two than anybody else this month for a similar reason: Heroes are made during the regular season, but immortals emerge in October.

Price, whom Boston signed for $217 million last winter, comes into this month with a career postseason record of 2-7 and a 5.12 ERA in 14 appearances (eight starts). He will start Game 2 of the American League Division Series against Cleveland. The Red Sox are going with the hotter hand, Rick Porcello, in Game 1.

Kershaw, who is in the midst of a seven-year, $215 million deal and missed two-and-a-half months with a back injury this summer, checks in with a record of 2-6 with a 4.59 ERA in 13 career postseason appearances (10 starts). He will start Game 1 against the Nationals.

“I think in Kershaw’s case, a lot of it’s been, if you just went six innings with him, his postseasons would look so much different,” one major league executive told Bleacher Report. “It’s the seventh and eighth innings that have skewed his numbers. I think Kershaw will be fine.”

Indeed, scan Kershaw’s postseason history, and you can point to a handful of instances that stand out like random auto accidents.

Take Game 6 of the 2013 National League Championship Series when the St. Louis Cardinals ambushed Kershaw for seven runs and 10 hits in four innings. Or Game 1 of the 2014 division series against the Cardinals when he gave up a 6-2 lead in the seventh.   

Then there was St. Louis’ Matt Adams slamming a three-run homer against Kershaw in Game 4 of the 2014 NLDS that erased the Dodgers’ 2-0 lead and led them to another elimination.

In the first six innings of his 10 postseason starts, Kershaw hasn’t exactly been untouchable, but he’s been fine: He has a 3.81 ERA in those instances, according to the scouting service Inside Edge.

As for Price, it is hard to argue with Boston manager John Farrell for choosing Porcello in Game 1 simply because the right-hander has been the Red Sox’s best pitcher all season.

“And, maybe by starting Game 2, Price will relax more,” the executive said. “Of course, if the Sox lose Game 1, he’ll have plenty of pressure on him. But I think he’ll handle it. He’s professional.”

2. Best Matchups

Are you crazy? That one is easy:

Toronto vs. Texas: This is a cage match. These two teams hate each other. Jose Bautista’s bat still hasn’t come down after that epic flip following his home run in Game 5 of the division series with Texas last year.

The beer that Toronto fan fired at Orioles outfielder Hyun Soo Kim during the Wild Card Game the other night? It was only last year when a Jays fan heaved a water bottle onto the field during the ALDS against Texas in that emotional Game 5, a scene that turned really ugly.

This May, when the Blue Jays were in Texas, the battle continued. Texas reliever Matt Bush drilled Bautista in the ribs, Bautista slid hard and late into second base, and then Rangers second baseman Rougned Odor popped him in the jaw. Odor is no stranger to fighting, as we told you in-depth here.

During the AL Wild Card Game Tuesday night, one fan in Toronto held up a sign reading, “We Want Odor.” You bet they do, and if we get through this division series without a bench-clearing incident or four, it will be the upset of the century. Gentlemen, lace up your boxing gloves, er, play ball. The only thing missing will be the ring girls.

Dodgers vs. Nationals: This is a battle between two clubs that have disappointed far more often than not over the past five years. The Dodgers only made it past the first round once in the last three postseasons. 

The Nationals produced baseball’s best record in 2012 but then were eliminated in the division series by St. Louis. They returned to the playoffs in ’14 but were cuffed in the division series by San Francisco. One of these two has to advance to the NLCS this year. Added bonus: Nationals skipper Dusty Baker continues trying to win his first World Series by getting through the team for whom he played much of his big league career, the Dodgers.

Red Sox vs. Indians: The spotlight is on the managers in this one. Cleveland skipper Terry Francona managed Boston to World Series titles in ’04 and ’07, and Red Sox pilot Farrell was Francona’s pitching coach in ’07. Before that, Farrell spent five years as Cleveland’s director of player development (2001-2006).

3. Worst Matchup for the Cubs

Look out, it’s coming right away: The San Francisco Giants, who defeated the New York Mets in Wednesday night’s NL Wild Card Game.

Though the Giants did not play well in the second half of the season, they present a tough combination: rotation depth and postseason experience. Madison Bumgarner will not be available until Game 3, but Johnny Cueto, Jeff Samardzija and Matt Moore are capable of pushing storm clouds into Chicago’s sunny season.

“I know one thing,” a veteran scout told B/R before the NL Wild Card Game. “If I’m the Cubs, I don’t want to face the Giants. If the Giants win, look out. They’ve been there, done that so many times in October.

“Bruce Bochy, Hunter Pence and Buster Posey are still there, they’ve got leadership and they’ve got starting pitching. I’m not ruling out the Giants at all.”

The Cubs won four of the seven regular-season games against the Giants, going 3-1 in Wrigley Field and 1-2 in San Francisco. They’re going to need every bit of their A-game in this series.

Added intrigue: Jon Lester, the Cubs’ Game 1 starter, was San Francisco’s No. 1 target on the free-agent market two winters ago before Lester finally picked the Cubs (six years, $155 million) over the Giants and Red Sox. San Francisco sent a recruiting contingent to Lester’s Georgia home that included Bochy, general manager Bobby Evans and Posey.

4. Best Potential World Series Matchups

Cubs vs. Red Sox: Where do we start? With Theo Epstein, of course. He was the architect who whipped The Curse of the Bambino and put together Boston’s first World Series champion team in 86 years in ’04. Now, he’s built these Cubs, and if they end their 108-year drought against anybody, Epstein will go straight to the Hall of Fame. But if they end it against Boston? Whoa.

Epstein, general manager Jed Hoyer and farm director Jason McLeod all once worked in Boston. Cubs ace Jon Lester helped Boston win the ’07 and ’13 World Series, and Chicago beat out Boston for him on the free-agent market two winters ago. Cubs pitcher John Lackey has “Red Sox” on the back of his baseball card. Boston slugger David Ortiz would be playing in his final games before retirement.

Bonus: two of the most picturesque parks in the majors for your viewing pleasure, Wrigley Field and Fenway Park.

Dodgers vs. Red Sox: Dave Roberts’ iconic stolen base in Game 3 in ’04 helped turn that ALCS around and send the Red Sox storming toward their first World Series title since 1918. To this day, he continues to get fan mail from Red Sox fans. But now he’s managing the Dodgers, and if they meet Boston in the World Series…well, you can bet that fan mail will slow down this month.

Cubs vs. Indians: You don’t have to be Bill Murray or John Cusack to know that the Cubs have the longest-running World Series drought in existence, not having won since 1908. But did you know that Cleveland ranks second at 67 years? The Indians haven’t won since the glory days of Bob Feller, Bob Lemon and Larry Doby. Bet ya Drew Carey knows that.

Nationals vs. Rangers: Really, the Nationals vs. anybody qualifies here. The last time there was a World Series in the District of Columbia, it was 1933. Yeah, it’s been a while, eh? The reason the Rangers would present a cool matchup: The club moved to Texas from Washington, D.C., in 1972. Plus, the Rangers’ 55-year World Series drought ranks as baseball’s third longest, behind the Cubs and Indians. The Rangers organization has never won a title since coming into the majors as the Washington Senators in 1961.

5. It Only Hurts When I Smile, Doc

Suddenly, an overwhelming story of the postseason involves ice, Ace bandages, cortisone shots and old-school tears: injuries.

One month ago, I would have told you Cleveland is the team to beat in the AL. As you know, the postseason is all about pitching, and the Indians had the best starting rotation in the game. But then right-hander Carlos Carrasco (11-8, 3.32 ERA) suffered a fractured hand and right-hander Danny Salazar (11-6, 3.87) suffered a forearm strain. And making matters even worse, right-hander Corey Kluber (18-9, 3.14) suffered a quad strain.

Bottom line: Carrasco is out for the season, Salazar will not pitch against Boston but may be available as a reliever if the Indians advance to the ALCS, and Kluber will start Game 2. Francona is left seeking rabbits to pull out of his cap.

In Toronto, easy to lose in the excitement of the thrilling AL Wild Card Game, was the fact that Blue Jays closer Roberto Osuna left in the 10th inning with shoulder fatigue. His status going forward is important, especially because Toronto also is without veteran setup man Joaquin Benoit, who suffered a torn calf muscle while running in from the bullpen to join a brawl with the Yankees during the last week of the season.

In Washington, ace Stephen Strasburg (15-4, 3.60) is out for the division series against the Dodgers and questionable after that. Catcher Wilson Ramos (knee) is done for the season. And second baseman Daniel Murphy is hampered (upper leg) but expected to be ready for Game 1.

6. The Irony of the Dodgers

While many other teams suddenly are fighting the battle of attrition, Los Angeles is mostly healthy. This after the Dodgers set disabled-list records during the year.

It’s true: A total of 28 different Dodgers spent time on the disabled list this summer, the most of any MLB club in 30 years. The Dodgers used a total of 55 players to win their fourth consecutive NL West title, including 31 different pitchers and 15 different starting pitchers.

All are Dodgers club records.

Take left-handed hitting outfielder Andre Ethier, for example. Because of a fractured leg, he played in just 16 games this season and had 24 plate appearances (.208/.269/.375, one homer, two RBI). Yet, he’s back, and the Dodgers will have him available off their bench because they like his experience.

Kershaw is healthy and dealing. Slugger Adrian Gonzalez, who started slowly because of neck soreness, received an epidural injection during the season’s first week and steadily improved. And for now, Rich Hill’s blister issues are under control, and he will start Game 2 against Washington.

7. One Key Player (Mostly) for Each Team

B/R polled a handful of scouts and…

Boston: Koji Uehara, setup man. Closer Craig Kimbrel has had an uncomfortable relationship with the strike zone lately, which should make all of New England nervous. Earlier in the season, the Sox were having difficulty even getting the ball to Kimbrel. Hello, Koji. Scout: “He’s had a nice last month, but he’s been up and down this season.”

Cleveland: Trevor Bauer, starting pitcher. With Kluber coming back from a strained quad and the team being down Carrasco and Salazar, the Indians’ fourth starter gets the Game 1 nod against Boston. Scout: “He’s got to pitch well. There’s no way you think of him as a No. 1 starter, and he’s going to have to pitch twice in this series.”

Texas: Sam Dyson, closer. Dyson (38 saves this year) has just 3.2 innings of postseason experience (all last year). Also, it was Dyson who served up the home run that sparked Bautista’s Bat Flip Heard ‘Round the World last fall. Scout: “There’s a lot of pressure on him. He’s never been in the spotlight before, and they’re going to need him pitching well in the ninth innings of close games.”

Toronto: Roberto Osuna, closer. He was removed from the AL Wild Card Game in the 10th inning with what the Jays called “shoulder fatigue.” Scout: “The status of Osuna is a…tell-all, end-all. If he’s not able to pitch, the Blue Jays’ chances are diminished immediately. Joaquin Benoit is hurt. Jason Grilli had a chance to save a game last week (Sept. 26), and he gave up four runs.”

Chicago Cubs: Setup men Pedro Strop, Travis Wood and Hector Rondon. Scout: “They’re loaded. I think their one Achilles’ heel is their setup guys getting the ball to Aroldis Chapman.”

Los Angeles: Rich Hill, lefty starter. At the age of 36, Hill (12-5, 2.12 ERA) experienced an awakening this summer. He also battled a blister on one of his pitching fingers that limited his innings and caused his removal during a perfect game last month after seven innings and just 89 pitches. Scout: “There’s a lot of uncertainty around him. He needs to come up big, no doubt.”

Washington: Trea Turner, center field. Turner hit .342/.370/.937 in 73 games with the Nationals this season, transitioning from shortstop to center field in the majors when the club developed a need. He swiped 33 bases in 39 attempts and was named the NL Rookie of the Month for both August and September/October. Scout: “People don’t do anything anymore. Nobody hits and runs. Trea Turner is the one guy in the league who runs. He could make a big difference.”

San Francisco: Sergio Romo, closer. The Giants led the majors with 30 blown saves, and beleaguered, deposed closer Santiago Casilla helped lead the charge. Romo must excel in the ninth, and Casilla as a setup man. Scout: “This time of year, it’s the closers, man. They’re going to make the difference. Every team is going to have to get tough outs in pressure situations, and if you can’t, you’re in trouble.”

8. Weekly Power Rankings

1. Wild-Card Format: Do not change it. Starting the postseason with a pair of Game 7s (essentially) is terrific. Turning the series into best-two-of-three would make division winners sit around too long. And teams not winning their division should be handicapped.

2. Rick Renteria: Manager who was squeezed by Cubs for Joe Maddon gets a second chance in same city with the White Sox. Priceless. You go, Rick.

3. Wrigley Field/Fenway Park: Never before have these two iconic parks been featured in the same World Series. This year?

4. NL West: The Dodgers and Giants must be rolling on the floor and giggling in their executive offices: The Padres general manager is serving a 30-day suspension. The Diamondbacks whacked GM Dave Stewart and manager Chip Hale, and Arizona, including interim GMs, has had seven GMs in the past 11 years and counting. And in Colorado, Walt Weiss flees as manager after the relationship between him and arrogant GM Jeff Bridich reached the point of no return. Cue The Three Stooges theme.

5. Korn Ferry: The executive search firm whose motto might as well be: “We place young executives from the Cleveland Indians wherever we can, even if the Indians haven’t won a damned thing since 1948 and there are far better candidates elsewhere.” Ugh. The latest: Minnesota Twins hire Derek Falvey, 32, as chief baseball officer, even though Falvey has never run a department before.

9. One if by Land, Two if by Sea, Three if by Long Ball

Look out, Cleveland. The Red Sox are coming! The Red Sox are coming!

Two of the past three times the Indians have gotten past the AL Wild Card Game, Boston has knocked them out (2007 ALCS, 1999 AL Division Series). And with a crippled rotation, John Farrell’s club presents a big challenge for the Indians.

“Their lineup is a tough lineup to navigate,” one admiring AL scout said. “They take such good at-bats from top to bottom.”

Not only did these Red Sox lead the majors with 878 runs scored, but their total was 101 runs more than the AL’s next-highest club, Cleveland at 777. The Red Sox, behind MVP candidate Mookie Betts, Jackie Bradley Jr., Dustin Pedroia, David Ortiz and Co., also led the majors in batting average (.282), on-base percentage (.348), OPS (.810), extra-base hits (576) and doubles (343).

According to the Elias Sports Bureau, the Red Sox are the first club to go from last place in its division to first place twice in a five-year span. Not exactly a badge of honor, except the last time the Sox did it they won the World Series in 2013.

10. Welcome Back to October, Young Cubs

Kris Bryant, Addison Russell, Javier Baez and all of you other young Cubs, here’s what you do on Friday before Game 1: step onto the Wrigley Field grass. Inhale the breeze from Lake Michigan. Maybe Snapchat someone a photo of the ivy. And enjoy. Because if you look at the all-time list of those who played the most games in major league history without ever having set foot in the postseason, here’s a brief snapshot of the rankings:

1. Ernie Banks, Cubs, 2,528 career games over 19 seasons (1953-1971).

5. Ron Santo, Cubs, 2,243 career games over 15 seasons (1960-1974).

11. Don Kessinger, Cubs for most of his career, 2,078 career games over 16 seasons (1964-1979).

11. Bringing the Heat in Texas

The Rangers might be the most battle-tested club in the postseason. Their 49 come-from-behind wins led the majors and were three more than the next closest, the Dodgers (46). The Rangers were 36-11 in one-run games, the highest win percentage in one-run games of any team in the modern era (1901-2016).

12. Matching Up in October

We’re not just talking about Snickers vs. Kit Kats on the trick-or-treating trails…

These numbers of postseason note are from the Inside Edge scouting service:

• Lefties Daniel Murphy and Bryce Harper will be keys against the Dodgers in the first round, especially against Clayton Kershaw in Game 1: Lefty hitters have an OPS of just .150 against Kershaw this season, according to Inside Edge. The league average is .327, and Kershaw ranks first.

• Boston’s Mookie Betts has not struck out in his past 78 plate appearances, the longest streak in the majors.

• Washington’s Max Scherzer, lined up to face Kershaw in Game 1 of the NLDS, has a strikeout percentage of 37.8 percent against right-handed hitters this year, which ranks second among qualifiers. The league average is 20.6 percent.

• Cleveland’s challenge will be to get the ball to closer Andrew Miller. Opponents have fanned 123 times in 275 plate appearances against him (44.7 percent). Yes, Miller ranks first in the majors among qualified relievers. The league average is 22.7 percent.

• Washington lefty Gio Gonzalez, who will start Game 2 against the Dodgers’ Rich Hill, will be a key in the series: The Dodgers have struggled against left-handed pitching this season, going 22-24 against lefty starters.

13. Moneyball: Playoff Payrolls

What’s the range of this year’s postseason teams? Right here, according to USA Today‘s MLB payroll database:

14. So Who’s Going to Win?

Being that I went with the Chicago Cubs in my season preview coming out of spring training, I have to stick with them. They clearly were the best team over 162 games, both the strongest overall and the least flawed. Their pitching is built for the playoffs: Jon Lester, Kyle Hendricks, Jake Arrieta and John Lackey. Their lineup is potent and versatile with Kris Bryant playing third base, left field, right field and first base, allowing defensive whiz Javier Baez to slide in at third base (look for him there during Game 1 against the Giants when Lester starts). And they have a prime-time closer in Aroldis Chapman.

So whom do they play? Well, the other part of my World Series prediction coming out of spring training wasn’t so good: the Houston Astros. So looking at the AL field now, I’m going to go with the Boston Red Sox. Their lineup is relentless, and they’re pitching better now than they did during the first part of the year.

So book it: Cubs over Red Sox in six games.

Scott Miller covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

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