Madison Bumgarner, who shows virtually no emotion on the mound, got the San Francisco Giants off to a terrific start in Game 1. Given an early cushion by Hunter Pence's home run, the man called MadBum by his teammates carried a shutout into the seventh inning and beat the Kansas City Royals 7-1 last night. "He doesn't get flustered out there," says Giants manager Bruce Bochy. Back on the field after a five-day layoff, the Royals looked nothing like the fresh team that had become baseball's darlings by starting the playoffs with eight straight wins.
The Giants led 3-0 after the first inning at Kauffman Stadium and won their seventh World Series game in a row. The Royals' string of 11 straight postseason wins, meanwhile, came to sudden halt. Bumgarner added to his sparkling World Series resume, improving to 3-0 and extending his scoreless streak to 21 innings before Salvador Perez homered with two outs in the seventh. Says Royals manager Ned Yost, "Well, we never got on base. That disrupts a lot of things when you don't get on base. The old adage is you can't steal first, and Bumgarner did a great job of keeping us off base. When you do that, we can't utilize our speed." Read more on the game here. (More World Series stories.)