Bumgarner’s arm, Gillaspie’s homer lift Giants past Mets

One hundred and sixty two games and all the ebbs and flows of a season that goes for that long and it all comes down to one game. Both the Giants and the Mets had the former, but only the Giants had the latter, and that’s why they’re headed to Chicago for what should be a fascinating series against the Cubs.

“There are not a lot of teams that have good success against him”, said Mets manager Terry Collins. Every time I go out there I try to do the best I can, and sometimes I can’t control what happens.

It’s October, so another big game ended with a Giant celebration. The Cubs clinched the NL Central on September 15, the earliest of any team, but had to wait until Wednesday’s NL Wild Card game to see who their opponent would be.

And that was it for the Mets in 2016.

Bumgarner flied out to the track in left field before setting the Mets down 1-2-3 in the ninth to cap a pitchers’ duel that lived up to expectations and then some. Syndergaard allowed just two hits and three walks while striking out 10.Neither team got a runner past first base until T.J. Rivera led off the fifth with a double.

-Key point: I am not in NY and am not covering the Giants in this first week of the postseason and the best reporting and analysis, as always, will come from those who are. He’s grown so much, even though he’s still very, very young. He has given up one run in his past 30 postseason innings dating back to the start of the 2014 World Series.

One thing that does come with the home field is the manager’s right to make a routine decision about when to use a closer in a tie game. He’s thrown 23 straight scoreless innings dating back to the 2014 World Series.

But what was Collins going to do? “You put in all this work to do your best to have your best swing come out when it matters”.

Familia needs to turn this around.

Eight months later, in his first playoff game, he saw a 96-mph fastball from one of baseball’s premier closers, Jeurys Familia, and lined it out of the park with Brandon Crawford and Joe Panik aboard and one out in the ninth. “It’s great to get that big hit, but it starts with the pitcher, and that’s what Bum gave us”. So there are some questions that need to be answered.

However, those can wait. You can really only chalk it up to the randomness of a one-game playoff.

The real truth is though nothing could be done to change this.

Reactions like that show exactly why Bumgarner is so good in October. Bumgarner is 27 years old and will certainly have many more playoff appearances in his future – he bought himself at least one more playoff start Wednesday night – but those games only stand to build on his historic legacy as the best pitcher in postseason history. Instead of taking the first game on the road, the Mets had suffered a stunning defeat that set the tone for the entire series.

The Cubs are 3-3 all-time in postseason series when they win Game 1, and just 1-12 when they lose Game 1; last year’s 3-1 series win over the Cardinals in the NLDS is Chicago’s only series win after a series-opening loss.

It doesn’t seem fair, but that’s life.