Opinion

When David Price's first pitch crossed the plate and got Game 1 of the American League Division Series going, there was so much optimistic energy in the air at the Rogers Centre that it's a wonder the umpiring crew didn't signal some sort of interference.

What followed, however, was a reality check. Both for Price and the Toronto Blue Jays as a whole.

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.

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.

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.

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."

They, in all their they-y wisdom, say that great pitching always beats great hitting. It's a notion that at least sounds logical, so it must be true.

We can say one thing, though: With Josh Donaldson, Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion leading the charge, the Toronto Blue Jays' offense is pretty well-equipped to disprove that notion this October.

The 2015 postseason, it's now obvious, will be a coming-out party for the Houston Astros. They are the "it" team, poised on the precipice of something special.

If the MLB Wild Card Games were the appetizer—the amuse-bouche, if you're feeling fancy—then the main course is about to be served.

Beginning Thursday and spilling into Friday, the four division series will commence. And boy, what a meaty meal that promises to be.

Of all the things that happened in 2015, the Chicago Cubs' winning 97 games with a major boost from a pitcher who came to the team as a throw-in player in a throwaway deal was arguably at the top of the "There's No Way This Is for Real" power rankings.

But after what happened Wednesday night, we now know this: This is for real, all right.