Madison Bumgarner

Talk all you want about odd-year curses. Point out that the San Francisco Giants are looking up at the Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League West and at the Pittsburgh Pirates and Chicago Cubs in the NL wild-card race.

LOS ANGELES – Gone are the days of pure hatred, the ones that caused Jackie Robinson to retire rather than play for the rival club, incited epic brawls and sparked beanball wars.

But the rivalry is not dead. Far from it. The fire still exists, as does the success.

Madison Bumgarner's pitching performance for the San Francisco Giants in the 2014 MLB postseason entitles him to do pretty much whatever he wants in San Francisco.

That includes riding a horse around AT&T Park before a game.

The San Francisco Giants embark on the 2015 campaign with one goal in mind: They want to defend their World Series title and win it again.

The baseball season is a long, arduous process, which makes the Giants' three world championships in the past five years a tremendous accomplishment.

A team's fortunes over the course of a six-month season typically hinge on more than one factor, but depending on how critical said factor is, that one wild card can affect things greatly.

It can be a good or bad performance. It can be a health issue, for better or worse. It can be how a player bounces back from an injury or a poor previous season. It can even be how a player produces during the ever-important contract year.

San Francisco Giants pitcher and living American myth Madison Bumgarner continued adding to the tall tale that is his life by channeling Paul Bunyan for a photo shoot at spring training Monday.

The 2014 Major League Baseball season has been over for two months, but San Francisco Giants pitcher Madison Bumgarner is still reaping the rewards for his postseason heroics. On Tuesday, he was named the Associated Press Male Athlete of the Year.     

In life, and in sports, nearly everyone experiences prolonged periods of both success and failure. Of course, the 2014 sports year was far from different, as fans were treated to some truly memorable performances, of both the good and bad sort.

Madison Bumgarner, for example, had a downright iconic year, establishing himself as one of baseball’s all-time greats with the type of postseason pitching we’d never seen before.

Imagine if Mark Twain and Grantland Rice drank rye by a bonfire all night and attempted to come up with an American folk hero for the modern sports era. 

After a short league-championship round, this year's World Series is a matchup between the San Francisco Giants and Kansas City Royals.

That might as well read Madison Bumgarner vs. James Shields, as no two players are more vital to their  teams' success than the two projected to start Game 1 of the Fall Classic.