Series MVP Madison Bumgarner's Heroics on 2 Days' Rest Cap Immortal October

Madison Bumgarner's postseason performance didn't need a finishing touch. After all he had done leading up to Game 7 of the World Series, his October was already one for the books.

But he gave it a finishing touch anyway. And in doing so, he turned a historic postseason performance into a truly iconic one.

On Wednesday night at Kauffman Stadium, the San Francisco Giants beat the Kansas City Royals 3-2 in Game 7 of the 2014 Fall Classic to clinch their third championship in the last five seasons. The list of reasons why they won includes a pair of second-inning sac flies, a couple instances of outstanding defense and a go-ahead RBI single by Mike Morse in the fourth inning.

But these might as well be footnotes. How the Giants won Game 7 was best summed up by Mr. Go-Ahead RBI himself, as relayed by Adam Kilgore of The Washington Post:

A. Men.

Tim Hudson started Game 7 for the Giants, but everyone knew Bumgarner was coming eventually. He would only be on two days' rest, sure, but not using him after he followed up seven innings of one-run ball in Game 1 with a complete-game shutout in Game 5 would have been absurd.

Giants skipper Bruce Bochy put the ball in Bumgarner's hand in the bottom of the fifth. As it turned out, it never left his hand.

The 25-year-old left-hander pitched the final five innings for the Giants. He struck out four and walked nobody. He allowed only two hits, and they came 14 batters apart. And in the end, he was on the mound when the final out fell harmlessly into Pablo Sandoval's glove.

Like that, Bumgarner clinched the World Series MVP with a save to go with the two wins he already had, and he lowered his ERA in the 2014 Fall Classic to 0.43. Overall, his ERA in three World Series is 0.25.

And now here we are in the same position we were in a couple days ago: trying to pick our jaws up off the floor so we can get a grip on the sheer history of Bumgarner's October.

When I went and looked after Bumgarner's Game 5 shutout at AT&T Park, it wasn't hard to see that he had already authored one of the great pitching performances in postseason history.

Beyond becoming only the third pitcher ever to make six postseason starts, at the time Bumgarner had pitched the second-most innings in postseason history while racking up a 1.13 ERA that ranked among the best ever. Between the quantity and quality of his work, the only postseason that really compared to his was Curt Schilling's run through October of 2001.

Dave Cameron of FanGraphs noticed it too, but he thought the same thing I thought. Bumgarner's postseason was good, but Schilling's was a little bit better and, of course, had happened at a time of incredibly heightened offense.

But he also wrote:

"

If Bumgarner manages to throw a few more dominant relief innings in Game 7, then there really will be a case that his run this year will have surpassed Curt Schilling’s 2001 season as the best postseason pitching performance in the history of the game. 

"

At the time, you could read that and go, "Yeah, maybe."

Now, you can read that and go, "Holy..."

It happened, all right. And knowing that what happened before had infrequently occurred, it's all too appropriate that what Bumgarner did in Game 7 has rarely been seen.

Jamie Squire/Getty Images

You can go to Baseball-Reference.com and look up World Series relief appearances of at least five innings with no more than two hits and no runs. Before Bumgarner on Wednesday night, there had been only six such appearances. And though four of them were game-enders, only one ended a Game 7: Joe Page in 1947.

Page, however, got to close things out at home. In closing out a do-or-die elimination game on the road, what Bumgarner did in Game 7 was a bit more reminiscent of Pedro Martinez's six hitless innings against the Cleveland Indians at Jacobs Field in Game 5 of the American League Division Series in 1999.

Isn't that right, Grantland's Jonah Keri?

So, Madison Bumgarner's 2014 postseason basically boils down to the following: Curt Schilling's 2001 postseason with Pedro Martinez's 1999 ALDS relief appearance tacked on.

And boy, does it look the part. The final damage is a postseason-record 52.2 innings over seven appearances with a 45-6 strikeout-to-walk ratio and a 1.03 ERA. That's a quarter of an otherworldly dominant season packed into one month, and the most pressure-packed month baseball knows at that.

All this leaves us with just one final question: Did we just witness the greatest pitching performance in postseason history?

It's not an ironclad yes. Nor should it be. That's a big question, and there's no shortage of historic postseason pitching to choose from. 

But at the very least, it's on the shortest of shortlists. And we can also say this: Especially in this day and age, you can't possibly ask for a pitcher to do more in a single postseason than Bumgarner just did.

The Giants may not get to the World Series without his heroics. They probably don't take the series to a Game 7 without his heroics. And more than likely, they don't win the World Series without his heroics.

The right thing to do along the way was to simply be in awe of it all. The right thing to do now is be thankful that you got to watch it. Going forward, the right thing to do is not forget it.

Really, the only wrong thing you can do is expect to see something like that ever again. Great pitchers will continue to make music in October, but we may never see another hit all the right notes quite like Madison Bumgarner did in October of 2014.

Note: Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com unless otherwise noted/linked.  

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