A few years ago there existed a fun little game to play, brought to my attention by Sam Miller, I think it was. The instructions were simple: Follow a Justin Masterson start, and see if he’d go the duration without ever throwing anything other than a fastball. Masterson would live and die by his sinker, and while he wasn’t the only fastball-heavy starter around, he would sometimes take things near the one-note extreme. Depending on your perspective, it was a testament either to his talent or to his limitations.

I don’t remember if Masterson ever did it. It wasn’t the kind of game you’d play for the memories. But these days, you could play a very similar, if opposite game. You can follow a Masahiro Tanaka start, and see if he goes the duration without ever throwing anything other than a non-fastball. The odds are presumably slim, because every new start brings 90-some chances, yet Tanaka is trending in a certain direction. You could just ask the Indians last night.

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I don’t know if this is ultimately going to matter much. As I write this, the Yankees are still leading the Indians by a run, and they only need to get six more outs. The odds are in the Yankees’ favor. But, not long ago, the odds were even more in the Yankees’ favor. Then we had controversy. Controversy! Our first controversy of the 2017 postseason, as far as I can tell. The scene: the bottom of the sixth, with two on and two out in an 8-3 game. It’s Chad Green, and it’s Lonnie Chisenhall, and the count is 0-and-2.

That’s not where that pitch was supposed to go. The result: the dreaded 0-and-2 HBP. You’d expect better of Green, and he certainly knew right away he didn’t execute like he wanted to, but if you watch that clip over and over, you might notice something. As the umpire signals for Chisenhall to take his base, Chisenhall appears to be surprised. Not that he was going to turn down the opportunity, but he didn’t respond like someone who’d been hit by a pitch in the body. Gary Sanchez immediately thought that something was wrong. Sanchez thought the ball hit the knob of the bat. Upon super-slow-motion instant replay, it looks like the ball did hit the knob of the bat.

And then the ball went into Sanchez’s glove! Which would make it, technically, a foul tip, which would lead to a strikeout. If the ball hit the bat, then Chisenhall should’ve been out, and that would’ve been the end of it. I’m not saying the instant replay makes it 100% incontestable, but it looks a lot more like bat than hand. And as you probably know, these plays are reviewable. Seems like that should’ve come in handy for the Yankees. They could get the umpires to take a look. They…didn’t. I have no idea why. Something tells me it’s going to come up later on. Sanchez thought Chisenhall was hit in the bat, not the hand, and he gestured toward his own dugout. No review was requested. Within seconds, this would loom awfully large.

Instead of 8-3 in the seventh, it became 8-7 in the sixth. Instead of the Indians’ win expectancy being about 3%, it was about 33%. Now, that’s not all on the call. Even after Chisenhall went to first, the Indians’ odds of winning stood at about 8%, and then Francisco Lindor had to do what he did to Chad Green’s delivery. Green, for his part, should’ve made better pitches. But in our sixth playoff game, we have our first real issue related to a call on the field — and instant replay — and now that I check back in, oh, look at that, the Indians have tied the game up. I’m sure Joe Girardi is looking forward to his presser. I can’t imagine what he’s going to be asked.

Yesterday, I wrote about how Jon Gray’s curveball didn’t work in the NL Wild Card game. Gray hung a bunch of poorly-located curves that the Diamondbacks crushed, and he was chased from the game in the second inning. Last night, though, Trevor Bauer showed what a good curveball in the postseason looks like.

With only four whiffs, you might not think the pitch was particularly dominant, but Bauer’s curveball was his best pitch of the night. Because, unlike Gray, he was able to keep it down.

Instead of just relying on whiffs, Bauer also managed to freeze hitters with curves in the zone, like he did to Aaron Judge here.

Eight times, Bauer froze a Yankee hitter with a curveball in the zone, including Aaron Judge twice for strike three. And when the Yankees did swing, it didn’t go much better for them.

15 times, a New York hitter went after Bauer’s curveball. Only seven of those 15 swings resulted in a ball in play. Here is what they did with those seven balls in play.

Hicks rocked a poorly located curve, but besides that, this is as weak as contact gets. With Sanchez’s double play, he still managed to rack up seven outs on the seven balls in play. Combined with the four strikeouts, Bauer got a total of 11 outs out of his 35 curveballs. Not bad indeed.

Bauer’s curve has always been his best pitch, and it’s probably not a coincidence that he’s had his best season while throwing his pitch more frequently than ever before. Bauer threw his curve 30% of the time in the regular season, and upped that to 36% last night. He’s not quite Rich Hill yet, but given what Bauer did to the Yankees with his breaking ball last night, they probably should expect a healthy dose of them if he gets into another game this series.

Of course, with Corey Kluber going today and Carlos Carrasco in Game Three, the Yankees might not see Bauer again this season.

On Tuesday, a couple of days ahead of the deadline, Cleveland Indians manager Terry Francona announced the Division Series roster that would take on either (at the time) the New York Yankees or Minnesota Twins. While the most surprising development was probably Francona’s choice to start Trevor Bauer in Game 1, there were plenty of other questions to ask. Should the team be worried about its bullpen after leaving three key relievers off the roster? Are six outfielders too many and 11 pitchers too few? And is carrying outfielder Michael Brantley so soon after his return from injury a good idea?

Michael Brantley has always offered a maddening combination of considerable talent and questionable durability. Selected in the seventh round of the 2005 draft by the Brewers, Brantley was sent to Cleveland as the player to be named later in the 2007 deal for CC Sabathia. After 2009, Baseball America ranked him fifth among the prospects in the Cleveland system, lauding his hit tool and control of the strike zone. After five poor-to-middling seasons to begin his career, Brantley broke out in 2014 with a six-win campaign, his first All-Star appearance, and a third-place finish in the MVP voting.

Despite his offensive outbursts, Brantley has spent a significant amount of time on the disabled list. In 2011, he missed the final month of the season with a wrist injury. The 2016 campaign saw him miss time due to his shoulder. This year, he lost nearly two months to a sprained ankle. With 274 days spent on the disabled list since the start of the 2016 season, Brantley’s availability seems to consistently be an open question.

Given his talents, the Indians clearly would like Brantley around. Moreover, teammates have described him as one of the team’s leaders. However, despite the progress Brantley has made in recovery and his miraculous at-bat this past Saturday, the playoff performances of players returning from injury should curb expectations for the club’s Opening Day left-fielder.

The most recent case of a player returning from injury for the playoffs came against these same Indians last year. Kyle Schwarber, who tore his ACL and LCL in the second game of the 2016 season, returned in the World Series to absolutely mash, slashing .412/.500/.471 in 20 plate appearances — including a key three singles in five at-bats in Game 7. While Schwarber was obviously integral to Chicago’s championship run, other players who’ve returned from injury to appear in the postseason have done so less successfully.

Since 2009, there have been 15 hitters who’ve resumed play in the last half of September from the disabled list and appeared in at least one playoff series. Some of their injuries were more serious than Brantley’s sprained ankle, others much less so; however, the performance of these players can best described, at best, as “middling.”

Now, of course, the posteseason is a place of impossibly small sample sizes, making any resulting lines incredibly variable. That aside, a third of the players here performed poorly in their very few trips to the plate, many in the pinch-hitting role that Brantley is expected to assume. A little under a third performed well, some very much so. This is, of course, the best case for Brantley, and he clearly has the talent to do so. The remaining players fell well short of their season performance and have also tended to strike out at a higher rate than normal. Maybe their timing has been off from their missed time? That’s merely a guess, though. Even accounting for small sample sizes and the increased quality of playoff pitching and competition, something is still lacking in their performance.

Brantley’s inclusion creates further complications for the Indians beyond performance questions. Even with Brantley’s progress in playing the field, he will be unlikely to play anything other than pinch- or designated hitter, forcing the Indians to carry five additional outfielders. As a result, the pitching staff is limited to 11 pitchers, which may be a little short if they weren’t maybe the best pitching staff ever. However, the lack of flexibility created by including Brantley may make the Indians miss hitters such as Yandy Diaz or pitchers such Dan Otero and Nick Goody.

It’s important to remember that the Indians are clearly a better team with a healthy Brantley. However, Brantley’s presence isn’t essential, either: the Indians did go on possibly the most impressive streak in baseball history, becoming the hot team going into the postseason and passing the Dodgers as the Vegas favorite to win the World Series. It’s understandable that the Indians want their one of their leaders back, but the performance of players returning from an injury to the postseason with the added roster flexibility questions makes Brantley’s inclusion a risky one. They might indeed be good enough to overcome a lesser Brantley performance, but Terry Francona and the rest of Cleveland’s decision-makers are certainly hoping that this decision doesn’t come back to haunt them.

CLEVELAND — While a lot of talk here and elsewhere has focused on bullpen-ing (not such a bad idea, right, Yankees?) and creatively leveraging pitching staffs early in the postseason, the Indians appear to be pursuing a different kind of unconventional strategy.

The club announced yesterday that, while staff ace and AL Cy Young candidate Corey Kluber will be fully rested for Game 1, he will not pitch Thursday against the Yankees. Trevor Bauer, one of the game’s best starters in the second half, will get the ball instead.

In this unexpected scenario, Kluber will start Game 2 and, if necessary, Game 5. Carlos Carrasco will start Game 3 in New York. Carrasco has been a significantly better road pitcher than home pitcher for his career (3.13 road ERA vs. 4.45 home ERA, 3.86 home FIP vs. 2.98 road FIP). He could face Luis Severino in that game, with Severino on regular rest. Or, since Sevenrino didn’t make it through an inning Tuesday, he could perhaps be available in Game 2. Josh Tomlin is penciled in as the tentative starter in Game 4 for Cleveland

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This season, 144 players reached the 502-plate-appearance threshold necessary to qualify for the batting title. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there were 190 position players who tallied between one and 99 PA for the season. In between, there were 291 position players. Some of these were starters who simply missed time due to injury (Bryce Harper, for example) or the nature of their position (Salvador Perez) or because they weren’t major leaguers yet at the start of the season (Paul DeJong), but some of them are what we’d call true part-time players. At this time of year, we generally focus on the very best players. It’s awards season, after all. Part-time players get less shine. So let’s focus on them today, at the very least.

I’ve done this exercise once before, back in 2012. Now, as then, I’ve parsed the list to give us a clear picture of who is really a part-time player. My favorite tool for this exercise is the “Lineups and Defense” pages on Baseball-Reference. When they redesigned the website recently (I think it was recently? Maybe it was last year? I don’t know, I don’t even remember what I had for dinner on Thursday.) I experienced a few panicky minutes when I couldn’t find the pages, but fortunately they’re still there. Phew.

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The Dodgers snapped out of it. After an extended slump, the Dodgers did manage to snap out of it, and so they finished with baseball’s best record. The Indians ultimately had to settle for simply having the best record in the American League. And yet, one might consider the Indians to be baseball’s best team. They had easily baseball’s best second half. They had easily baseball’s best run differential. They had easily baseball’s best BaseRuns record. You could say it’s all just recency bias, but, recently, the Indians have been almost literally unbeatable. It’s quite a difficult thing to exaggerate.

The Indians this season could field, and the Indians this season could hit. More than anything else, however, the Indians this season could pitch. They could pitch when games were beginning, and they could pitch when games were concluding. It was a pitching staff without a clear weakness. According to WAR, Indians pitchers were better than the next-best staff by about seven wins. According to the other version of WAR, the one based on actual runs allowed, the Indians pitchers were again better than the next-best staff by about seven wins. Turns out these Indians weren’t just the best in 2017. They’re the best we’ve seen in a long, long while.

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Last year, perhaps without even knowing it, Andrew Miller became the father of a bullpen revolution. It was a year ago when Miller, entering multiple games in the fifth and sixth innings, helped propel a Cleveland team down its No. 2 and No. 3 starting pitchers to the brink of a World Series title.

The Indians were lauded for their creative use of Miller, freeing him from the shackles of the save to impact games in high-leverage situations and for multiple innings. He avoided the fate of Zach Britton, another dominant left-hander, who looked on longingly from the Rogers Centre bullpen as his Orioles fell to the Blue Jays in an extra-inning Wild Card game.

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Quick: who’s the best left-handed hitter likely to appear in the American League playoffs this October? If you took more than three seconds to come up with an answer, don’t worry, that’s perfectly normal. The National League contenders have plenty of high-profile left-handed hitters: Charlie Blackmon, Cody Bellinger, Bryce Harper, Daniel Murphy, and Anthony Rizzo immediately stand out. Not so in the American League.

Postseason roster construction can have a lot of consequences. Once rosters are set, there are only so many machinations that can or will surprise us, but in a lot of cases, series can be won or lost by the selection of the the last five guys on the roster. I focused on some interesting roster-construction decisions last week. In the meantime, the possible configurations of the Astros bullpen have remained with me. If Houston utilizes a tandem-starter approach, it will lessen their flexibility for their bullpen; as such, they might not have room for LOOGYs. Of course, a LOOGY is only necessary to the extent that there are dangerous left-handed batters to face. The potential absence of a LOOGY from the Houston bullpen led me to a larger question about the batters whom that pitcher might face — specifically, whether any of the AL teams need a LOOGY to navigate October?

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Even the Cleveland Indians, the best team in baseball by run differential and authors of an AL-record winning streak, aren’t without question marks.

Currently, they’ve got a significant one — namely, in center field. Just over a week ago, Chris Davis stepped on Bradley Zimmer’s left hand as the latter attempted a head-first slide into first base. The result: a broken fourth metacarpal. Zimmer, who had taken over the lion’s share of work in center field, is now probably out for the rest of the season, including the postseason.

In the absence of Zimmer, Cleveland was left with a void in center. To understand how they’ve decided to address that void, it’s necessary to know a little something about the infield.

The Indians like their infield alignment. Recently, the club shifted Jose Ramirez from third base to second — where he rates as a well above-average defender — and assigned third-base duties to fellow Fringe Five alum Yandy Diaz and his intriguing gifts. That pair is complemented by Giovanny Urshela — at the very least, an excellent late-inning defensive replacement who also possesses enough glove to back up Francisco Lindor at shortstop. This was the formula the club used during their 22-game win streak.

With the infield settled, the Indians found themselves wondering what to do with longtime second baseman Jason Kipnis, who has recently returned from another stint on the DL.

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