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Madison Bumgarner stands near the top of the best postseason pitching performers.

Madison Bumgarner’s postseason performance got us to thinking ...

What are some of the other great recent examples of a pitcher (or a pitching tandem) single-handedly carrying a team to a World Series title?

If you go through major league history, we’re putting Bumgarner in a class with the likes of Hall of Famers Christy Mathewson, Bob Gibson and Sandy Koufax. David Schoenfield covered that Friday in the SweetSpot blog.

But let’s look at the past 30 years for examples, with our criteria being that (A) you had to be great and (B) you had to be great for multiple rounds ...

Orel Hershiser, 1988 Dodgers

Hershiser came out of the bullpen to get a bases-loaded fly out to center in the 12th inning of a one-run Game 4 win in the LCS that turned the series around, and then shut out the Mets in the Game 7 clincher.

He then went 2-0 with a 1.00 ERA and was 3-for-3 as a hitter in a World Series upset of the Athletics, with a win in the series clincher.

That followed a close to the regular season in which Hershiser broke Don Drysdale’s record for consecutive scoreless innings.

Dave Stewart, 1989 Athletics

Dave Stewart was a workhorse for the 1989 Athletics, notching four of their eight wins, two apiece in the LCS and World Series.

Stewart threw eight innings in each of his two LCS wins and pitched a shutout in the World Series opener, then added a win in Game 3 after the series resumed (due to the San Francisco earthquake), pitching seven solid innings.

That postseason, Stewart went 4-0 with a 2.25 ERA.

Jack Morris, 1991 Twins

Morris was 4-0 with a 2.23 ERA in five postseason starts. He won two games in the LCS and two in the World Series and will be best remembered for his 10 scoreless innings in Game 7 of the World Series against the Braves.

Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling, 2001 Diamondbacks

We pair these two, as they were best known as a duo, one that shared World Series MVP honors.

Johnson is the last pitcher to win three games in a World Series. He won two as a starter (including a shutout) and one in relief (Game 7). That postseason, he was 5-1 with two shutouts, a 1.52 ERA and 47 strikeouts in 41 1/3 innings pitched.

Schilling was 4-0 with a 1.12 ERA in six starts. He won a pair of one-run games in the LDS against the Cardinals, winning 1-0 in Game 1 and 2-1 in Game 5. He pitched a 12-strikeout complete game against the Braves in the NLCS.

He made three starts in the World Series, winning one and allowing no more than two runs in each. He yielded two runs in 7 1/3 innings in an epic duel with Roger Clemens in Game 7, which the Diamondbacks won on Luis Gonzalez’s walk-off hit.

Schilling logged 305 innings that season, between the regular season and postseason. No pitcher has thrown that many since then.

Josh Beckett, 2003 Marlins

Beckett had an epic two-week stretch to carry the Marlins to an improbable title.

With the Marlins down, three games to one, he shut out the Cubs in Game 5 of the NLCS. He pitched four innings of one-run ball in relief on two days' rest to help the team to a Game 7 win in that series.

Though he lost to the Yankees in Game 3 of the World Series, he was terrific, allowing only two runs and three hits in 7 1/3 innings. Then, he pitched a shutout on three days' rest in Game 6 in Yankee Stadium to clinch the series.

Cole Hamels, 2008 Phillies

Hamels went 4-0 with a 1.80 ERA in the postseason with at least one win in each round and copped both LCS and World Series MVP honors as the Phillies knocked off the Brewers, Dodgers and Rays to win their first World Series since 1980. The Phillies won each of his five starts.

Madison Bumgarner, 2014 Giants

Madison Bumgarner had two wins, a five-inning save and an 0.43 ERA in the World Series.

He finished the postseason with a 4-1 record and a 1.03 ERA.

He won the wild-card game in Pittsburgh, and won both LCS and World Series MVP honors, clinching the World Series with five scoreless innings of relief in Game 7.

-- Mark Simon

By the math, the best of those was ...

There's a way to look at this and rank these performances from a statistical perspective.

Win probability added (WPA), a stat tracked by the Elias Sports Bureau and also found on Baseball-Reference.com and Fangraphs, measures how players affect their team’s win expectancy on a play-by-play basis.

Using this metric, we can quantify a player's performance across different eras and see how much he contributed to his team compared to other pitchers.

In Game 7, Bumgarner threw five scoreless innings in a one-run game, and had a WPA of .603, the highest by a reliever in any winner-take-all game in postseason history.

Bumgarner had a 1.26 WPA during this year’s World Series, the sixth highest by any pitcher all-time in a single World Series. Three of the five names above him are in the Hall of Fame -- Waite Hoyt, Stan Coveleski and Christy Mathewson, the most recent of those being Hoyt in 1921.

Jack Morris isn't a Hall of Famer, but among the pitchers from the past 30 years, he rates a spot above Bumgarner with a 1.32 WPA.

But looking over the entire postseason, Bumgarner’s WPA (1.7) was the second highest by any pitcher in a single postseason in MLB history.

The only one higher -- Schilling, who had a WPA of 2.1 with the 2001 Diamondbacks.

-- Lee Singer

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