MLB

Baseball children: still the undefeated featherweight champions of the sports children world.

I've covered it before, so I won't elaborate further on the stranglehold of awesomeness baseball children have on the sector of youth/sports fandom.

Fact: Jake Arrieta is the first pitcher in MLB postseason history to throw a shutout with at least 10 strikeouts and no walks.

Bleacher Report will be bringing sports fans the most interesting and engaging Cold Hard Fact of the day, presented by Coors Light.

Source: SportsCenter

With MLB's Wild Card Round in the books, the playoffs will kick off in a more traditional sense Thursday as just eight teams remain in contention for a World Series berth.

Both the Houston Astros and Chicago Cubs kept their hopes alive by winning wild-card games, but things won't get any easier as both the American and National Leagues are stacked with quality teams that are all capable of making a deep run.

Somewhere in Pittsburgh, a cooler lays battered and bruised—possibly impaled on spikes due to a special "fatality" button-mashing.

And its killer was Sean Rodriguez, who transformed into some kind of Jack Sparrow/Rocky Marciano hybrid after being ejected from Wednesday night's National League Wild Card Game between the Pittsburgh Pirates and Chicago Cubs.

East meets West—or, more accurately (at least geographically), North meets South—as the champions of the AL West, the Texas Rangers, and the AL East champs, the Toronto Blue Jays, prepare to get American League Division Series play underway Thursday afternoon at Rogers Centre.

After 162 games, the St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago Cubs will meet in a National League Division Series comprised of NL Central foes.

On paper, both the Cardinals and Cubs have what it takes to advance to the National League Championship Series. Over the next few slides, we'll break down the upcoming series position by position to try to determine which team has the upper hand. 

The similarities are present.

You get that with two underdog playoff teams. You get it more when those teams were expected to be on the outside looking in by the time their seasons ended, and you get it when both teams showed a penchant for contending but were still expected to fall back and be nonfactors in the race to a World Series.

It all comes down to this. After looking at the best players at each position over the last few weeks, the B/R MLB 300 is now ready for its final act: putting everyone together on the same list.

Following two days of MLB wild-card drama, the American League will kick off the division series Thursday without fear of immediate expulsion.  

Don't let any friends, family, pundits or random strangers on Twitter declare these as "must-win" games. Taking Game 1 would sure be swell, but that's not how math works. Everyone is at least afforded some breathing room in a best-of-five showdown.

NEW YORK — Michael Cuddyer played in the postseason five times with the Minnesota Twins.

The only series they won was the first one.

Cuddyer was 23 years old, most of his teammates weren't much older (Torii Hunter and David Ortiz were both 26), and the Twins were playing in October for the first time in 11 years.

"And we had to play Game 5 in Oakland," Cuddyer said last month. "It wasn't easy."