One player whom the baseball industry and vacationing families might not have expected to see this week at Disney’s sprawling Swan and Dolphin Resort, the site of this year’s Winter Meetings, was Melvin Upton Jr. You might have — particularly if you’re a Braves fans — erased Upton from your memory. But Upton was there to sell himself to interested clubs. He was ultimately successful.

More on that in a moment. First: a brief tour of Upton’s career, which has followed an unusual trajectory.

The former No. 2 overall pick and elite prospect was moved to the outfield early in his major-league career by the Rays due to his shortcomings at shortstop. And it was in Tampa’s center field where he emerged as a star-level player, averaging 3.6 WAR per season from 2007 to -12. Upton possessed a rare blend of plate discipline, power, and speed. He then signed a lucrative free-agent deal with the Braves. Things didn’t go well. He posted a -0.6 WAR in 2013 and a 0.3 mark in 2014. To rid themselves of the three years and $57 million remaining on Upton’s contract, the Braves included him with Craig Kimbrel in a package that sent both players to San Diego before the 2015 season.

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The Indians signed reliever Dan Otero to a deal yesterday. It wasn’t for much in baseball terms, $2.5 million over two years, and that might make sense. He doesn’t strike anyone out and is only projected to be a little bit better than league average. That’s if you look at his overall arsenal. If you pick one pitch, he’s got a good one.

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Not every team approaches the offseason looking to get better in the same way. That much is obvious: budget alone can dictate much of a club’s activity on the free-agent market. A little bit less obvious, though, is how the present quality of a team’s roster can affect the players they pursue. Teams that reside on a certain part of the win curve, for example, need that next win more than teams on other parts. That can inform a team’s decisions in the offseason.

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What’s so remarkable about Corey Kluber’s second Cy Young Award, the receipt of which was announced Wednesday evening, is he won it despite missing a month of the season. At the All-Star break, it looked like Sale in a runaway, but Kluber found another level and produced one of the great Cy Young comebacks of all-time. That’s how dominant he was from the point at which he returned in June through the end of September following a trip to the DL with a back strain.

How good was Kluber?

Starting with that appearance against Oakland on June 1, Kluber struck out 224 batters (!). That’s 224 strikeouts in two-thirds of a season. That’s 224 strikeouts against 619 batters faced, good for an astounding 36.2% rate. He walked only 3.7% of those same batters.

The difference between Kluber’s strikeout and walk rate (K-BB%) from June to September was 32.5 points. To put that mark in context, consider: among all pitchers, only elite bullpen arms recorded Craig Kimbrel, Kenley Jansen and Chad Green better marks for the season. (It should be noted that Chris Sale led MLB starters over the whole season with a 31.1-point differential. Kluber finished second to Sale among starters, with a 29.5-point mark.)

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The postseason game is changing around us. Starting pitchers are being asked to go harder for shorter periods of time, allowing teams to begin playing matchups with the bullpen as early as the third inning. And while strategically sound in most cases, this trend has emerged without a major change in how we think about rest and schedules in the postseason. As much as we might love the high-intensity matchups that “bullpenning” provides, is it possible that pitchers are having to endure greater stress than in the past?

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The Cleveland Indians’ season concluded on Wednesday night. The team that had thrilled fans with their September winning streak and entered the postseason as the oddsmakers’ favorite to win the World Series was eliminated by a very good New York Yankees team. You can argue how fair it it that the Indians, by virtue of being the best team in the American League this year, had to face the Wild Card-winning Yankees, perhaps the second-best team in the the American League. In any event, that’s the way the playoffs are set up: the Yankees won and the blame game can begin.

People will look to the young star hitters Jose Ramirez and Francisco Lindor, who combined to reach base at a .227 clip, strike out 13 times, and record just a single extra-base hit over the five games. Others will (foolishly) question the Indians’ mental fortitude after dropping six consecutive potential series-clinching games in the past two years. And yes, many will place blame at the feet of Indians ace Corey Kluber, who was as rough in this year’s playoffs as he was brilliant in last year’s.

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CLEVELAND — In a spartan, fluorescent-lit conference room adjacent to the home clubhouse of Progressive Field sat Corey Kluber early this morning. The night before, he’d started — and lost — Game 5 of the ALDS to the Yankees. It was clear as Kluber pitched on Wednesday that something wasn’t right. It hadn’t been right in his Game 2 start on Friday, either.

Surrounded by a swelled press corps containing local and national reporters, he was asked what was wrong, what had gone wrong. Inevitably, the topic of his health arose. Despite producing a Cy Young-caliber season, Kluber had also visited the DL from May 2 to June 1 with a back strain.

By the end of the series against New York, Kluber had allowed nine earned runs and 13 baserunners — including four home runs — in 6.1 innings over two starts. Two of the home runs he’d conceded were off his curveball. He’d allowed only two homers off the curve all season, a sample of 811 pitches.

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Last night, the Yankees and Indians combined to strike out 31 times, the most strikeouts ever recorded in a playoff game that didn’t go extra innings. And during our live blog, complaining about the size of Jeff Nelson’s strike zone was a common occurrence. Accusing the home plate umpire of malfeasance is a regular thing fans do, especially in the postseason when the stakes are the highest, but in looking at the data today, there is some validity to the arguments. Last night, Jeff Nelson called a pretty huge strike zone.

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In the ninth inning of Game 5 on Wednesday night, Brett Gardner batted against Cody Allen for nine minutes. The Yankees were looking to add to a one-run lead, while the Indians were an out away from getting to give it one more try against the hardest-throwing pitcher in the world. Gardner batted with two runners on, and as his at-bat grew longer and longer, there was an increasing sense of urgency. Gardner batted for nine minutes after Todd Frazier had batted for five minutes, and it all meant that Aroldis Chapman was spending more time not throwing. More time cooling off. As Gardner saw pitch after pitch after pitch, insurance felt more and more critical. Chapman might come back out feeling too cold. You don’t want a pitcher sitting for half of an hour.

The last pitch was the twelfth pitch, and the twelfth pitch was fateful. Gardner lined a single into right, and since the count had been full, the runners were running. Aaron Hicks had no problem scoring from second, and to make matters worse for the Indians, an error allowed Frazier to also slide home. That last run was only salt in the wound; Hicks’ run felt like the killer. Although you can never know for sure, and although it was just last postseason that Chapman suffered a stunning blown save in the same ballpark, anything beyond a one-run margin felt insurmountable. For all intents and purposes, Brett Gardner ended the ALDS.

For Gardner, it was his longest plate appearance since 2014 — but for another 12-pitch at-bat he’d had in the fifth inning. For Allen, it was his longest plate appearance since 2012. It was the kind of at-bat that tempts you to read too much into it — to say things like, “there’s your proof that the Yankees don’t quit,” or “the Indians can never close anything out.” You shouldn’t give in. The at-bat didn’t mean anything larger. It was just an incredible at-bat, in a critical situation. And I’d like to go through it, pitch, by pitch, by pitch.

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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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