Mr. October

Shank starts his annual sporadic coverage of the baseball postseason and, as luck would have it, writes a column about the Chicago Cubs and former Red sox general manager Theo Epstein.

Theo Epstein isn’t complaining. His Chicago Cubs just finished their regular season with 97 wins, which hasn’t been topped by any Cubs team since 1945, and the Cubs’ whole season could be over Wednesday night . . . but Theo knows that’s how the playoffs work. He was a little kid in Brookline when the 99-win Red Sox were taken out of the playoffs by a swing of Bucky Dent’s bat back in 1978.

Doesn’t matter. That’s October baseball. And there’s no crying.

Nothing in baseball beats a one-game playoff. That’s what we saw Tuesday night when the Astros beat the Yankees, 3-0, and that’s what we get Wednesday night in Pittsburgh when the Cubs and Pirates — two of the three best teams in baseball — play a single game for the right to move into the Division Round.