Clayton Kershaw Is a Narrative Killer

All season long, the Los Angeles Dodgers have relied on their one-two pitching punch of Clayton Kershaw and Zack Greinke, and it has been no different in their National League Division Series. He allowed just one run and struck out eight batters in seven innings, pitching on just three days rest. The winner hosts the wild-card Chicago Cubs in the NL Championship Series opener Saturday.

Murphy was at the plate when the tying runs at the bottom of the eighth inning were on with two outs. Greinke allowed two runs in seven innings to force a sixth game, which Kershaw started and lost 9-0 to end the season.

With Greinke and deGrom meeting, Kershaw says the series is “dead-even”. The decisive Game 5 will be played Thursday night at Dodger Stadium, where Los Angeles right-hander and Cy Young Award contender Zack Greinke will face the Mets’ ace, All-Star right-hander Jacob deGrom. We’re going to give you a five game series. “He’s just very impressive, very tough to square up”.

Toronto’s surge into Major League Baseball’s post-season and performance in the American League Division Series has seen the Blue Jays’ Twitter popularity explode, with the team’s official Twitter account gaining more than 350,000 followers over the course of the season, putting them over one million total followers. Both teams expect nothing less than both of them going out and being untouchable. The Maple Leafs had 1,034,103 followers and the Blue Jays had 1,030,844 as of Tuesday night – a difference of just 3,259.

A person familiar with the process tells on condition of anonymity that Chase Utley’s appeal hearing on his two-game suspension has been scheduled for Monday.

“He’ll paint the corners”.

When TV cameras caught Flores in tears during the Mets’ game July 30, as word had leaked that he was about to be traded to Milwaukee for Carlos Gomez, the images touched a lot of hearts. He threw a fastball by him and hung a slider.

“When you’re looking at the Kansas City side, they’ve got three power guys”, Mets Manager Terry Collins said. The dynamic duo of Kershaw and Greinke surrendered six total earned runs in their three outings thus far, while the Mets’ heralded trio of deGrom, Noah Syndergaard and Matt Harvey gave up five.

The duo was even dominant enough to withstand a pair of blown saves in the World Series by closer Byung-Hyun Kim and prevail over the Yankees in seven games. Cory Schneider missed the game for birth of his son early yesterday morning.

As they should. The season is on the line. “They’ve given us two guys that stop streaks, save your bullpen, are just day-in, day-out consistent guys”, manager Don Mattingly said by phone Wednesday when both teams travelled back to Los Angeles.

“You’ve got to accept the fact that he’s not a strikeout guy”, Collins said. He also spent all of 2015 watching his teammate, Zack Greinke, finish with a 1.66 ERA, the best mark in the major leagues since Greg Maddux’s 1.63 in 1995.