After Bauer's Early Exit, Cleveland Bullpen Stitched Together a Matter-of-Fact Win

Back on September 17, facing Justin Verlander and the Detroit Tigers, the Cleveland Indians saw starter Carlos Carrasco take a comebacker off his pitching hand and exit after just two pitches. The bullpen then worked 10 innings without surrendering a run in what became a 1-0 victory. Anyone watching the game thought they saw an inspiring but ultimately empty performance, a team patching together a late-season win but losing a player essential to any long-term success (Carrasco was soon ruled done for the year). Cleveland manager Terry Francona, apparently, saw a blueprint.

In Monday night's ALCS Game 3 against the hard-hitting Toronto Blue Jays, Trevor Bauer recorded two outs before the stitches in his right pinkie proved insufficient to hold together the slice in the finger sustained from a drone accident days prior. What had been a kind of boggy scab before the game turned into a steady drip and then very nearly into a full-on leak; the pen would be called on for 25 outs. The Cleveland relief corps had enjoyed a stellar October, but wading through almost a full game against a homer-happy team in a homer-happy park seemed like a tall order. It turned out not to be.

Toronto scored two runs over those eight and a third innings of relief, on a solo home run and an RBI dribbler, and the Indians scored four, giving themselves a 3-0 series lead. What most impressed about the pitching was how unimpressive it was, a shruggy assumed competence; you'd have thought they play every game this way. Cleveland's relievers bear remarkable resemblances to one another, which helps with the assembly-line effect: true to his name, Trevor Manship is a kind of plain and bulky guy, Zach McAllister looks like a taller version of Manship, Bryan Shaw looks like a shorter version of McAllister who has grown a goatee, and Cody Allen looks like a Shaw who let that goatee turn into a beard between innings. They all trudge out to the mound with set faces, and they all throw hard fastballs and bendy little breaking balls. Francona used each of them for at least one inning but less than two, taxing them but not to the point of a crucial mistake.

The exception to the workmanlike vibe is Cleveland's best reliever, the sky-tall and phenomenally gifted Andrew Miller. Much has been made over the postseason of his appearances in the middle of games, his willingness to pitch whenever Francona thinks he'll be of greatest use, but Monday night he got the glamour gig, recording the last four outs on three Ks and a grounder. Where the rest of the crew can be summed up pretty simply—no phrase will ever capture Shaw's 94 mile-per-hour fastball better than "94 mile-per-hour fastball"—Miller is once again the exception. His heater, put at the spot by the hitter's knees where those hitters will always complain when umpires always call strikes, is an out-of-the-shadows dagger; his slider is a flying saucer if flying saucers were even loopier and more dazzlingly off-putting than popular media has led us to believe. Melvin Upton is still rubbing his eyes over the one he saw in the ninth.

Recent postseasons have been testing centers for new kinds of bullpen usage. The template of the lights-out closer as embodied by Mariano Rivera gave to the tiered relievers of the Kansas City Royals, which now seems to have given to an even more expansive idea, brought on by equal parts necessity and ingenuity. Last night, the Indians had no choice but to go to their bullpen early and often, but they had the arms and the manager to pull it off. It was impressive, but it wasn't a total shock; they had done it before.