.sdrawkcab siht tog ev'yehT

They've got this backwards.

All we've been hearing for the last two days is about the New York Mets' Noah Syndergaard and how unbeatable "Thor" happens to be. We're not buying it for a second.

You can argue about whether they deserve it but you can't deny one simple fact: October is here in the San Francisco Giants are still alive. A second-half that included just 28 wins doesn't seem deserving of the postseason. But the final week of the 2016 regular-season campaign saw the Giants win five games out of six, including a season-ending sweep of the Dodgers. 

They didn't get lucky, they didn;t beat up on bottom dwellers, they simply played baseball at a level we hadn't seen from them in two months. The four-game streak to end the season was their first such run since the All-Star Break, and on it's momentum that even-year magic still has a chance to come through.

Yes, the Mets are formidable. Yes, the Mets had a more consistent regular season. Yes, there's every reason to believe the Mets are going to win Wednesday,s wild-card playoff game against the Giants. So why is that sense of impending doom so absent?

We know the match ups. Syndergaard is the best the banged-up Mets have to offer, and he's downright scary. But don't you really think that as soon as those match-ups were announced there were people in New York who had one singular thought: "Oh my God, it's Bumgarner!"?

Now granted this hasn't been a vintage year for MadBum. The numbers are there, especially wins and losses, but like the Giants themselves this has been a season of two haves. His first two dozen starts had him on track for a career year. The past two months, not so much. Plus, the home runs have been a problem all year. 

We know this, everybody knows this. And yet it's the playoffs, and we know that come the postseason Bumgarner is just a different cat. The Mets know it too.

We're not going to sell them at short; these are the defending National League champs. But their Achilles heel is left-handed pitching, even more so due to injuries. Once you get past Reyes and Cespedes they can still hurt you if you make a mistake, but it's not exactly murderers' row.

Plus, there aren't a lot of teams that pull off what Kansas City did last year, namely bouncing back from the World Series lost to take the whole ball of wax. The Mets face of formidable challenge. The Giants certainly aren't going to make it easy.

No one has been more critical of the Giants over the season, and especially over the second half, than this particular blog. When they stink, we say they stink. When they do something well, we give them credit. It's unvarnished, unabashed, unapologetic fan talk straight from the heart. And yet now were at that point where you have to decide whether or not to trust your team. 

We're not cocky here but we know this is the Giants, and we know what happens when they have their backs against the wall.

We saw it in the last week of the regular season. They were faced with a situation going into that last home stand where they needed to win both series and knew they probably had to sweep LA. As it turned out that was exactly what was required as the Cardinals kept up the pressure until the very last out. The Giants came through, winning five out of six and, yes, sweeping the Dodgers to punch their ticket to the postseason.

We've seen this movie before. In 2012 we counted them out heading back to Cincinnati. In 2014 they stumbled in as the final wildcard and we thought it was nice just to get in, but there really wasn't that much hope. We won't even talk about 2010, which literally was torture. We were just happy to be there.  And then Brian Wilson said "Hey, we've got as good a chance as anybody. Why not us?"

That set the tone for this entire era of Giants Baseball. There oughta be a T-shirt: "Why not us?" It's a perfect rallying cry for a team that has always been more than the sum of its parts.

We learned two years ago that being the wildcard really isn't all that different. Yes there's the pressure of one a winner-take-all game but if you happen to get past that you're in the same boat as everybody else. It doesn't matter if you won 81 games or 121; it's best-of-five and best-of-seven and the team that performs under those conditions is gonna walk away with the ring.

Okay, there's the home field thing, but really? In 2010 they clinched at Philly and at Texas. In 2012 they won the Series at Detroit. The final out in 2014 was recorded at Kansas City. Home field: Overrated.

A win over the Mets and the Giants into the postseason on even footing with everybody else. They have the chance to make that wretched second half nothing more than a footnote.

After 162 contests, the season gets a reboot. It's all square (too much Ryder Cup). 

Orange October is here.