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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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.