If there’s a story of the two League Championship Series so far, it’s dominant pitching. Saturday was the first time in baseball history that there were two 1-0 playoff games on the same day, thanks to Michael Wacha, Anibal Sanchez, and friends. Just last night, Max Scherzer became yet another Tigers starter to take a no-hitter deep into a game, at least before David Ortiz ruined Detroit’s evening.

Look at the Dodgers, who rolled out Zack Greinke & Clayton Kershaw in their first two games. In 15 innings the co-aces combined to strike out 15 and allow two earned runs… but Los Angeles still lost both, because they couldn’t solve the outstanding St. Louis pitching. The Cardinals are hitting .134 as a team, and they’re up 2-0. Baseball is a weird game sometimes.

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Clayton Kershaw “struggled with his fastball command,” wrote one recap of Thursday’s NLDS Game 1 in Atlanta. “He couldn’t throw the ball where he wanted,” said another, again referring to his fastball, and he “wasn’t at his best early,” wrote yet another.

Those takes were all accurate, and when you’re reading reviews of a starting pitcher’s playoff performance and they contain phrases like that, you’re probably wondering just how badly things went. You might think those terms would be more appropriately applied to someone like Pittsburgh’s A.J. Burnett, who was awful in the Pirates’ 9-1 loss to St. Louis in Game 1 of their series.

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Entering the season, Indians closer Chris Perez was probably pretty high up on the “closer most likely to get replaced” lists, but somehow he kept surviving. He kept the job through a sore shoulder, he kept it through drug charges, and he kept it through home run troubles that led to an awful 5.08 FIP. But finally, in the waning days of the season and in the midst of a miraculous run to the playoffs, manager Terry Francona could stand no more and finally removed Perez from the job on Friday.

Now, as the Indians welcome Tampa Bay to Cleveland for the one-game American League wild card game on Wednesday, Francona is suddenly without a defined closer. But that’s not the problem it might otherwise be, because what he does have available is an intriguingly unorthodox option — Opening Day starter Justin Masterson, who made his first All-Star team this year and has exactly zero career saves to his name. Masterson missed most of the final month with an oblique injury and is not considered to be stretched out enough to start until later in the playoffs, if at all. Read the rest of this entry »