Given everything that happened later on Wednesday, you might have forgotten that, earlier on Wednesday, the Giants won another must-win game over the Reds in Cincinnati. The Giants won a game that was started by Barry Zito, which lately has not been unusual. Barry Zito himself was quite terrible, which lately has been more unusual. The Giants won mostly because they finally started to hit — they finished with 11 hits in 33 at-bats, eight of which went for extra bases. But another crucial contributor was one Tim Lincecum, pitching in long relief.

Lincecum was not the first guy Bruce Bochy went to out of the bullpen. After Zito discovered a way to walk Dioner Navarro with two outs in the third, Bochy called on George Kontos. Kontos began the fourth, and then was replaced by lefty Jose Mijares, to face lefty Joey Votto. Mijares struck Votto out for the second out of the frame, and after that bit of unplanned strategic genius, Bochy signaled for Lincecum. Lincecum got out of a jam by striking out Ryan Ludwick, and then Lincecum just kept on pitching through the eighth.

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So far, the San Francisco Giants and the Cincinnati Reds have played three games in their Division Series, with the Reds winning two of them. In one game, the Giants’ offense finished with seven hits and six walks in nine innings. In another game, the Giants’ offense finished with two hits and three walks in nine innings. In the last game, the Giants’ offense finished with three hits, a walk, and a hit batter in ten innings. From that information, spot the Giants’ lone victory.

It was the last one, by the way. In Tuesday’s must-win Game 3, the Giants racked up all of three singles in an extra-innings contest, but good pitching and a timely or untimely error by Scott Rolen allowed the Giants’ postseason dreams to stay alive. They might not survive through Wednesday, but given Tuesday’s offense, it’s a minor miracle they’ve gotten this far.

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All the way back in May, I came up with a pretty simple way to calculate “expected strikes” based on data available at FanGraphs. I don’t know if I was the first person to do this, and it’s so simple I’d be surprised if I were, but I remember me so I’m linking to me. Once you have expected strikes, you can compare that total to actual strikes, and maybe then you can learn something about the pitcher(s) or the catcher(s) or about something else. I”ll explain further!

FanGraphs provides for you total pitches, total strikes, and plate-discipline data based on PITCHf/x data. By using zone rate, you can come up with pitches in the zone, which leads to knowing pitches out of the zone, which leads to knowing swings at pitches out of the zone. Based on those numbers, you can end up with an expected strikes total. You’re way ahead of me — I probably don’t need to explain this in great detail.

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At this point, it might not make a whole lot of sense to talk about Sunday’s Game 1 of the Cardinals/Nationals NLDS, since Game 2 is already well underway at this writing. And if we’re going to talk about Sunday’s Game 1, it might not make a whole lot of sense to focus on just one single pitch. Game 1 featured several pitches, dozens of pitches, and each was important. But where many have discussed the decision to replace Mitchell Boggs with Marc Rzepczynski in the top of the eighth, I want to discuss the result of Rzepczynski’s first at-bat.

The controversy, if you want to call it that, is that the Nationals had two runners in scoring position with two out, and instead of letting Boggs face the left-handed Chad Tracy, Mike Matheny chose to have the left-handed Rzepczynski face the right-handed rookie Tyler Moore. Moore singled home two runs, turning a 2-1 deficit into a 3-2 lead, and the win-expectancy swing was about 47 percent. That single won Game 1 for the Nationals — it was a pretty important single.

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The Giants lost to the Reds 5-2 in Game 1 of their NLDS on Saturday, but for San Francisco, it wasn’t so bad — there were identifiable moments where things easily could’ve gone differently. One break here, one break there, and maybe it’s the Giants instead who’re leading the series. The offense, certainly, didn’t look as bad as its ultimate two-run total. While every game is important when there can only be three, four, or five games, at least the Giants could come away feeling like they hadn’t been badly outplayed.

In Game 2, the Giants got themselves slaughtered. The Reds scored nine runs, the Giants scored zero runs, the Reds racked up 13 hits, and the Giants racked up two hits. In Game 2, the Giants were badly out-hit, and accordingly, in Game 2, the Giants were badly out-pitched. With Madison Bumgarner pitching at home against Bronson Arroyo, I can’t imagine there were many people out there who expected the Giants to lose by the score of a forfeit.

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Eventually, you’re all going to get sick of me talking about how everything that’s going on now is for all intents and purposes unpredictable. Hopefully you aren’t sick of it yet, because Game 1 of the NLDS between the Reds and the Giants went to show why playoff predictions are a complete waste of time. Allow me to review the action:

(1)Ace Cincinnati starter Johnny Cueto had to be removed after eight pitches due to injury, but

(2) the Reds still beat the Giants 5-2 on Saturday, because

(3) they hit two home runs off Matt Cain in AT&T Park.

It would’ve made perfect sense for this to turn into a pitcher’s duel. Cueto is one of the better starting pitchers in the National League, Cain is one of the better starting pitchers in the National League, neither the Reds nor the Giants have amazing team offenses, and AT&T Park suppresses run scoring like it’s poisonous and AT&T Park doesn’t want people to get poisoned. Instead, Cain was passable for five innings, and Cueto barely pitched. There still weren’t a whole lot of runs, but this didn’t go the way it was supposed to go.

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Major League Baseball’s six divisions were won by one, two, three, four, eight, and nine games. The Giants finished eight games ahead of the Dodgers, and their lead reached double digits on September 20. The Reds finished nine games ahead of the Cardinals, and their lead reached double digits on September 11. Suffice to say, for both teams, it’s been a while since they played what felt like a legitimately important game. Saturday, the important games resume all of a sudden, as the Giants and Reds are squaring off in a National League Division Series.

Incidentally, one wonders about the effects. Some people argue that it’s better to have to play at full intensity all the way through to the end, while other people argue there are benefits to being able to relax. Both the Giants and the Reds have more or less been able to relax, their playoff spots long secure, and we’ll never know how much this mattered, if it ends up having mattered at all. If it does matter, maybe it’ll matter about the same for both, since they’ve both been in similar situations. Nothing’s getting settled in this paragraph so here comes the next one.

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Every weekday morning, I have the exact same routine. The alarm on my cell phone goes off, I yell at it for a few minutes, it doesn’t stop making noise, then I succumb and get up and turn on the coffee maker. My first walk is always to the kitchen, to start making coffee, and then the rest of the day begins. Yet as certain as I am every morning that I’m going to make myself coffee, I’m still less certain of that each day than I was that the Red Sox would dismiss manager Bobby Valentine. If anything the surprise was that he lasted through the end of the year. Valentine was a dead man sitting, and now a year after finding a new manager, the Red Sox are in the early stages of finding a new manager.

And the guy reportedly at the top of their wish list is one-time Red Sox coach and current Blue Jays manager John Farrell. Last year, the Red Sox tried to get Farrell until the Blue Jays were like, “wait, no.” Now the Red Sox want Farrell again, and the Blue Jays are listening. Farrell’s still got another year on his contract, so while the Jays are open to the idea of him bolting for Boston, a trade would have to be worked out. That’s a trade involving a manager, which, as you can imagine, is historically pretty rare.

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We’re to the point now of there being less baseball, which means we’re to the point now of there being more important baseball. The stakes are the highest they’ve been, and all those little managerial decisions people love to complain about during the regular season might at last be worth actually complaining about, because the leverage of everything is suddenly through the roof. Every little decision now could conceivably contribute to a team winning or not winning the World Series. Thursday, we all got news of one decision in particular — for Friday’s Wild Card playoff against the Cardinals, the Braves will start David Ross at catcher instead of Brian McCann.

It feels weird to imagine the Braves deliberately benching McCann at a time like this, where one game will decide whether there are subsequent games. McCann’s long been the regular in Atlanta, up to and including this season, and by and large he’s been a terrific one. You’d think that a team would go with its trusted regulars in a one-game playoff, no matter how much it also trusts its backups. But it’ll be David Ross catching Kris Medlen and the relievers, and more, the decision seems sound.

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