Boom baby! 17 of 22. 8 straight at home. Back to .500 and 4 games out. And those playoff odds grow every single day. A month ago they were -5%. Then slowly they got to 0. Then to .2, then to .4. And now? Whole percentage points! Honestly this season kind of reminds me of a reverse of what we saw from this team from 1993-2005. Instead of starting out 25-10 and slowly dying as the season went on, this team was dead from the outset and seem to be coming to life in the last month. Like they were 12 games under on August 19th! All of a sudden these young arms get called up and are pitching like the mid 90's Braves. Meanwhile Ron Roenicke is piecing together wins with a group of minor leaguers and rag tags like he's frieking MacGyver and jump starting this squad back to life. Nori Aoki is a diet Ichiro, Ramirez is hammering the baseball and fielding like Roger Dorn at 3rd and Ryan Braun is suddenly in the MVP conversation. And the cherry on top is this Marco Estrada quote from last night:

"We're playing great baseball and we know we have the team to go all the way," Estrada said. "A lot of people doubted us when we were down, but we didn't lose any confidence. We knew how well we could play."

Watch your poop mouth Marco! I half expected him to have war paint on riding a horse around the locker room when he said that. Bottom line is this team is oozing confidence. Is that going to translate to leaping over 3 teams, winning a one game playoff and the World Series? Maybe not. But how poetic would it be if we pull a Cardinals from last year while bouncing them from the playoffs? Maybe I spent too much time reading Matt Christopher novels as a child but to quote a modern day philosopher; I can feel it in the air tonight! Let's do this Crew! Playoffs! We're not that drunk!