Best Postseason Win: Washington Nationals

The Washington Nationals have now existed for eleven years. In those eleven years, they have made the playoffs twice, and in both of those appearances, they have lost their first series.

So we're not drowning in a sea of options here. Fortunately, one of the team's three postseason wins is pretty good - 2012 NLDS Game 1: Nationals 3, Cardinals 2. The game matched up (maybe) the best pitchers on each team - Adam Wainwright, who had missed 2011 due to Tommy John surgery and spent 2012 still showing the effects, and Gio Gonzalez, who I believe became the first starter ever to win 20 games without throwing 200 innings.

Best Postseason Win: Washington Senators

The Washington Senators were one of the original American League franchises in 1901, and relocated to Minnesota in 1961. (They were replaced by another iteration of the Senators that year; that team would relocate to Texas a decade later and become the Rangers. The second Senators did not make a single postseason appearance, so this is the only mention they'll get in this series.)

In their 60 years of existence, the original Senators won the AL pennant a total of three times. They weren't quite the St. Louis Browns, but they still very much earned the line: "First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League." They were so bad, in fact, that even the presence of arguably the greatest pitcher in baseball history wasn't enough to pull them entirely out of the doldrums; in the first 17 years of Walter Johnson's career (1907-1923), they had fewer winning records (6) than bottom-two finishes (7), only twice finished within 10 games of first, and won no pennants.

Until 1924, that is. The 36-year-old Johnson was still effective that year, and finally had a quality team built around him, with future Hall of Famers Goose Goslin and Sam Rice in the outfield, future AL MVP Roger Peckinpaugh at shortstop, and a solid group of pitchers, including Firpo Marberry, regarded as one of the first relief aces. (He had almost as many starts - 14 - as saves - 15 - in 1924. Suffice it to say that the "relief ace" standards have changed a little in the intervening 90 years.)

That team finally claimed Washington's first pennant, setting up a World Series against the New York Giants, who had won their fourth NL flag in a row. The Series itself was a really good one, and culminated in one of the most famous games in baseball history.

Game 7, 1924 World Series: Senators 4, Giants 3 (12).

Best Postseason Win: Minnesota Twins

The two best postseason games the Twins have ever won are probably the two you would expect: Game 6 and Game 7 of the astounding 1991 World Series. Both games check all of the boxes you could hope for in a best postseason win - hugely important, team won the World Series, legendary plays, heroic individual performances (or sports-heroic, at least).

So naturally, I am picking... neither of them. Instead, I'm going to cheat just slightly and pick a game that's not technically from the postseason - but it may as well have been, and in terms of in-game excitement, it easily surpasses both of the 1991 contests.

It's the 2009 AL Central one-game playoff: Twins 6, Tigers 5 (12). Both teams had to play all-out through the scheduled end of the regular season, so neither necessarily had the starter it wanted available for this game; however, the Twins were still able to use Scott Baker, who was roughly as good as ostensible ace Nick Blackburn, while the Tigers had a much larger dropoff from Justin Verlander to Rick Porcello.

Best Postseason Win: Kansas City Royals

Game 1, 2015 World Series: Royals 5, Mets 4 (14). In 2013, Matt Harvey was a phenom, posting a 2.27 ERA in 178.1 innings; meanwhile, Edinson Volquez put up a 5.71 figure spread across two NL West teams, both of whom play in pitcher's parks.

In 2014, their fortunes were sharply reversed. Volquez cut his ERA nearly in half, going for a 3.04 mark in Pittsburgh, while Harvey missed the entire year after Tommy John surgery.

And in 2015, both pitchers were very good (13-8, 2.71 for Harvey; 13-9, 3.55 for Volquez), and they faced off in Game 1 of the World Series.

2015 MLB Postseason: The statistical view

With baseball season having wrapped up, it's time to return to one of my favorite topics: postseason statistics, We'll look at the MVPs and LVPs in both pitching and hitting, then introduce a series that will carry me through the rest of this year.

Grand Slam Scores update: Post-2015

And we're back (again). A second stolen computer and a move to a less theft-prone apartment later, and I should be up and running for the foreseeable future. On the other hand, the goal of posting regular ranking updates for the entire 2015 season has vanished just as thoroughly as my previous two laptops, so I'm taking the rest of this year to overhaul the Melog rating in a few ways. If my computer remains my computer, I'll plan to resume regular ranking updates at the beginning of next year.

For now, here's something a bit simpler: an update on where the best players of 2015 now stand in Slam Score.

Melog Rankings: Post-French Open 2015

And we're back. Apologies for the interruption; it turns out that the difficulty of compiling tennis rankings based on inordinately large spreadsheets increases exponentially when somebody steals your computer. But the computer has now been replaced, the spreadsheets re-accessed (thanks to the cloud-based version of Office), and we're up and running again.

So... did anything interesting happen while I was out of action?