Opinion

CHICAGO — Holy cow, as Harry Caray surely would have said.

Holy crap, as the Los Angeles Dodgers may as well have said late Saturday night.

On Saturday night, the Chicago Cubs won their first National League Championship Series game since way back in 2003.

They couldn't have done it without a few assists from the Los Angeles Dodgers.

What do you get when you take the postseason version of Mariano Rivera, flip him around, replace his deadly cutter with a deadly slider and ask him to take on a slightly different role?

Basically the Andrew Miller you're seeing right now.

The Los Angeles Dodgers survived a thrilling five-game series with the Washington Nationals to earn a berth in the 2016 National League Championship Series. Now they prepare to face baseball's only 100-win team, the Chicago Cubs, for a spot in the World Series.

The Cleveland Indians struck first in the American League Championship Series against the Toronto Blue Jays, engineering an impressive 2-0 victory Friday at Progressive Field.

It was a continuation of a so-far unblemished postseason, which began with the Indians winning 3-0 against the Boston Red Sox in the division series.

For their part, the Jays ran into a wall after blasting past the AL Wild Card Game and sweeping the Texas Rangers in the ALDS. 

When you look up Francisco Lindor's page on Baseball-Reference.com, the first thing you notice at the top of the page is his big smile.

The first thing you see at the bottom of the page is what the site calls similarity scores, which is an attempt to match batters statistically to all the others who have played the game.

The two guys most similar to Lindor: Carlos Correa and Corey Seager.

Here's one thing we know for sure: The 2016 National League Championship Series is going to feature a lot of blue.

The Chicago Cubs knocked the orange-and-black San Francisco Giants off in four games, and on Thursday the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the red-clad Washington Nationals in Game 5 of their division series matchup.

It's the Cubs' second consecutive trip to the NLCS and the Dodgers' second in four years. 

Having had a few days to rest and recharge, the Toronto Blue Jays and Cleveland Indians will get back on the diamond Friday in Game 1 of the 2016 American League Championship Series.

The Blue Jays and Indians both swept their American League Division Series opponents. Toronto knocked out the Texas Rangers, while Cleveland sent the heavily favored Boston Red Sox packing.

We learned a few things in the 2016 American League and National League Division Series.

We learned it will be the Cleveland Indians vs. Toronto Blue Jays in the AL Championship Series and the Los Angeles Dodgers vs. Chicago Cubs in the NL Championship Series. All four teams won three games to advance, which I suppose is another lesson in case anyone's new to this whole postseason baseball thing.

WASHINGTON — Scorecards were savaged. Heads were spinning. Benches and bullpens were dwindling.

And that was all well before Clayton Kershaw talked his way into the ninth inning of the most backward, brilliant, incredible, pulsating, unusual and exhausting game the Los Angeles Dodgers may have ever created.

"No, no; never in my wildest dreams," Dodgers pitching coach Rick Honeycutt said—champagne splashing, Chicago Cubs awaiting—when asked whether he's ever seen anything like it.