Cubs have more wins, but Giants bring fortitude

NEW YORK - The last time the San Francisco Giants won a wild-card game, two years ago in Pittsburgh, reporters dutifully marched down to the visitors' clubhouse at PNC Park and shielded themselves from the spray of Budweiser while trying to find people with whom to discuss this accomplishment, not to mention what they thought of their upcoming opponent, the Washington Nationals.

In one corner stood veteran pitcher Tim Hudson.

So, Tim, what about those Nationals?

“Obviously, they have a talented group over there, there's no question,” Hudson said. “They have some great pitching. But come playoff time, talent can take you a long ways, but what do you have between your legs? That's going to take you real far. And I think we've got a group in here that really has some of that.”

It is two years later. Hudson is retired. The Giants, who won another wild-card game Wednesday night - this time 3-0 against the New York Mets at Citi Field - aren't lined up to face the Nationals.

And yet that same theme, expressed with rare candor by Hudson, now looms over this postseason.

Ahead of the Giants this time, in a division series that begins Friday at Wrigley Field, are the Chicago Cubs. By any measure, the Cubs were baseball's best team. They won 103 games; since the advent of the wild-card format in 1995, only four teams have won more in a single season. They have front-line pitching in postseason stud Jon Lester, ERA champ Kyle Hendricks and 2015 Cy Young winner Jake Arrieta to start the first three games. They have one MVP candidate in third baseman/outfielder Kris Bryant and another in first baseman Anthony Rizzo. They have a dominant closer in Aroldis Chapman, a proven manager in Joe Maddon.

And yet - let's dust off this stat again - since the wild-card format came about, there have been 22 100-win teams. How many have won the World Series? Two (2): The Yankees in 1998 and 2009.

History might inform the future, but it doesn't predict it. Still, there are plenty of reasons the Giants feel dangerous, and the Cubs beatable, at the moment.

“What do I think?” left-hander Madison Bumgarner, a billion times a postseason hero, said after throwing a four-hit shutout at the Mets. “I like our chances. I'll go to battle with these guys any day.”

No sport embraces statistics as baseball does, and rightfully so. The game can be understood and enhanced through numbers better than any other.

It matters that the Cubs allowed fewer runs than any team in baseball, that only the mile-high Rockies outscored them in the National League, that they led all of baseball in the advanced metric of defensive runs saved (with 82, 31 more than the next-best team). It matters not just that they had the best record, but that their statistics support why.

But on the eve of the Giants-Cubs series, it's hard to escape the words Hudson spoke two years ago. That Giants team, beleaguered and boasting a pitching staff that was aging beyond Bumgarner, faced the 96-win Nationals, the National League's best team that year. Because Bumgarner had started the wild-card game against the Pirates - a game in which he also threw a shutout - they did not have their rotation set heading into the Washington series.

The way those Giants lined up:

Jake Peavy, who had been jettisoned from Boston at the trade deadline, in Game 1.

Hudson, at 39, who had not only gone 9-13 during the regular season but posted an 8.72 ERA and a .357 batting average against during a miserable September, in Game 2.

Bumgarner, the stud, for Game 3.

And Ryan Vogelsong, he of the 8-13 record, 4.00 ERA and 37-year-old right arm that had spent three years in Japan, for Game 4.

Remember this: The Nationals were the last team to beat Bumgarner, in Game 3, saving their season for a day. The other three twirled 181/3 innings of one-run ball for the Giants.

This Giants team doesn't have Peavy for Game 1 against the Cubs and Lester, a Cy Young candidate. It has Johnny Cueto, who went 18-5 with a 2.79 ERA in his first year in San Francisco. It presumably has Jeff Samardzija, who went 12-11 with a 3.72 ERA in his first year in San Francisco, for Game 2 against Hendricks, who failed to complete five innings in either of his postseason starts last year. And it certainly has Bumgarner for Game 3, back in San Francisco, against Arrieta.

This isn't to say that one performance on Wednesday night in Queens means an 87-win team is suddenly favored against a 103-win team, but the Cubs haven't won a World Series since 1908, and the Giants have won three since 2010. Does any of that history matter?

“It's good to be moving on,” Bochy said. “Trust me, because we had to scratch and claw just to get to this point. But it's all about persevering, and this club has done a great job of that.”

There are, in that one exchange, three full-throated, dust-em-off-and-pull-em-out baseball clichés. But because the Giants are here - again - they apply, because their persevering with all manner of spare parts has happened before, and could happen again, and who's to say what this group has between its legs?