The thing about hype is it makes the expectations almost impossible to meet. Hype is what makes you excited for an event, but then it’s up to the event itself to live up to the billing, and the standards can be impossible. Game 7 of a playoff series? That’s a high bar. Game 7 of the World Series? Higher bar still. Game 7 of a World Series featuring the two teams with the longest active title droughts? The hype spirals out of control. The game couldn’t possibly be what you’d want it to be.

That game was what you’d want it to be. Even if you weren’t rooting for the Cubs, you might never see a better baseball game. Maybe you’ve seen games that were as good, but you couldn’t top that, not for the drama, and not for how very Baseball it was. It was a one-run game that went to extra innings. The winning pitcher was the world-class reliever who blew a three-run lead. The losing pitcher wasn’t even supposed to have to pitch. The Cubs jumped out against the Indians’ unhittable ace, who for the first time was left in too long. The Indians clawed back with a two-run wild pitch that got by a catcher inserted specifically to help the pitcher on the mound. That same catcher, who’s now retired, then hit a home run off one of the only relievers who might be better than the Cubs reliever who later blew the save. Both teams used starters in relief. There was a rain delay and a bunt for a strikeout. The last out of the game was made by Michael Martinez. The final go-ahead run was scored by Albert Almora.

Almora scored on Ben Zobrist’s double. That made it 7-6, and Cubs fans were once again able to breathe. In a game packed full of moments, that might have wound up the moment, the moment that set the Cubs on their course. Before that moment, there was a different one. Almora scored on the double. He first had to get himself into position to do so.

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By the time a pitcher gets to October, his body and his mind are headed in different directions. The head can’t stop racing, but the body is battered by six months’ worth of battle. That probably seems intuitive, but it’s actually relevant tonight in a very concrete way: Cleveland right-hander Corey Kluber is once again going to climb the mound on short rest, with body and mind at odds. Here’s the good news for Indians fans, though: while the results of postseason short-rest starts isn’t great, the process — which is to say, the movement and velocity recorded on pitches — suggests that adrenaline trumps all when it comes to postseason ball.

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It was an ugly night for Cleveland for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, they lost Game Six of the World Series. Second, they allowed nine runs. Nine.

Third, Tyler Naquin happened. In a variety of ways. What does that mean, exactly? First, there was this Bull Durham-esque snafu in the first inning.

Kris Bryant had already gone yard with two outs in the first inning. Anthony Rizzo and Ben Zobrist had followed with singles. Addison Russell, as shown above, then poked a very catchable fly ball out to right-center field. We may never know what temporary madness possessed Naquin at this moment. We do know that he didn’t grade out as a very good center fielder this year, nor did possess the most sterling defensive reputation before his ascension to the big leagues.

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You never want to overreact too strongly to what happened the night before. You never want to overreact too strongly to what’s happened in a postseason series, or even an entire postseason. A hallmark of a great manager is often knowing when to ride their guys out and when to take action, and players are so much more than one- or seven- or 20-game samples that it’s rare to see enough in such a short time to reasonably warrant a change.

It’s easy to forget that, per plate appearance, Tyler Naquin was actually Cleveland’s best hitter this year. That’s a real thing that happened, and that occurred over 116 games and 365 plate appearances. We know, for a fact, that Naquin possesses the ability to do great things at the plate, because he is literally the same person that just did great things at the plate. Naquin was a legitimate Rookie of the Year candidate, even favorite, for much of the year, though it’s easy to forget that now, after a rough postseason was punctuated by an even worse Game Six of the World Series.

For the postseason, Naquin’s hitting .190/.227/.286. He’s struck out in over half his plate appearances, and he’s walked once. Again, that’s a nine-game, 23-plate appearance sample. It’s important to always compare that to the 365-plate appearance, 135 wRC+ sample, for context. That doesn’t change the fact that Naquin, most recently, has struggled. Less recently, but still recently, he’s struggled, too. Over the final two months of the regular season, he ran an 83 wRC+, the power he showed in the first half having almost completely disappeared. He hasn’t hit a home run since his infamous pinch-hit, walkoff, inside-the-park homer against the Blue Jays all the way back on August 19. That’s two-and-a-half months without a dinger, and even that one didn’t leave the yard.

And so after last night, a game in which Naquin struck out in both his plate appearances, including Cleveland’s highest-leverage plate appearance of the game, and perhaps more notably was involved in, and possibly was the culprit of the first-inning fly ball mishap that kept the inning alive for the Cubs and led to two runs, plenty of Cleveland fans have called for Naquin to sit Game Seven in favor of Rajai Davis, despite right-hander Kyle Hendricks being on the mound for the Cubs.

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Unofficially, Game 6 was over in the blink of an eye. Officially, it wasn’t complete for three and a half hours, but from close to the start, most fans were thinking ahead to Wednesday. Even while Game 6 was going, Game 7 was on everyone’s mind, as we prepared for the most anticipated showdown in, what, at least 15 years? You’re on this site right now to read about baseball, but you’re not looking to read about the game in the books. You want to read about the finale. Nothing is ever as important as it is in the finale.

Game 7 presents a funny situation. It’s one game, so it could turn on almost literally anything. In Game 6, after all, the biggest point according to win expectancy was Addison Russell’s routine fly ball that somehow dropped between two outfielders. Who would’ve guessed? You can’t predict any one-game scenario. At the same time, it’s never more critical to maximize the odds. Strategic calls are at their most important. Bullpen usage is at its most important. Lineup construction is at its most important. There’s nothing after Game 7 but gray clouds and winter. Half of the players will have a happier winter than the others.

As that lineup construction goes for the Cubs — look, I don’t want to deceive you. This isn’t that critical. What I’m writing about probably won’t make the biggest difference. But I see a case for starting David Ross over Willson Contreras. It has a lot to do with a guy supposedly available out of the bullpen.

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Yesterday I slapped together an InstaGraphs post about a Jon Lester strikeout of Brandon Guyer. It was a called strikeout on a pitch off the plate, but it was also a strikeout Lester has recorded several dozen times before. That part, I found interesting. But the call was also important in the moment. It changed the Indians’ odds of winning Game 5 by 10 percentage points, and during the game I tweeted that out with a screenshot. I didn’t expect the tweet to blow up like it did.

This isn’t supposed to be boastful. Wow, retweets, all right. Nobody cares. What happened as a consequence of that tweet going around was that countless different people started showing up in my mentions. And wouldn’t you know it, but those people had opinions about the strike zone! Some people were convinced the umpires were in the tank for the Cubs. Other people were convinced the Indians didn’t have any right to complain after calls they’d gotten earlier. More people still accused me of whining for some reason, as if a screenshot and a fact are opinions. The overall response was emotionally charged. Maybe not a surprise, in a World Series elimination game, but people were stirred the hell up.

Guess what! The zone’s been even. The Indians have gotten calls in their favor. The Cubs have also gotten calls in their favor. The World Series isn’t over yet, of course, but through the five games we’ve watched, neither team has really gotten a more favorable zone to pitch around.

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This past Sunday night, one of the most important baseball games of the year went head-to-head with a primetime regular-season NFL broadcast on NBC. Millions more opted to watch the Chicago Cubs host their final home game of the year and stave off elimination in a close game. That Major League Baseball went head-to-head with the NFL and won isn’t that big of a deal. That MLB has garnered ratings not seen in a decade, however — and bested the top-rated program in all of television over the past few years — represents a big win for a sport receiving near-constant criticism for sagging ratings.

The broadcast of Game Five on Sunday night was one of the highest-rated broadcasts for the World Series in years. Since Boston ended their 86-year championship drought back in 2004, only one game has drawn more than the 23.6 million viewers Cleveland and Chicago netted on Sunday night: Game Seven of the 2011 World Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and Texas Rangers. If you remove clinching games, it was one of the most viewed games of the century. The table below shows the most-viewed non-clinching games since 2000, the year FOX exclusively began broadcasting the World Series.

More people tuned into to see Sunday night’s World Series game than watched Game One in 2004 when the Red Sox began their attempt to end the curse. The game drew more viewers than the epic extra-inning Game Six between the Cardinals and Rangers in 2011. Indeed, only one non-2004 World Series game exceeded Sunday night’s in terms of viewership: the Diamondbacks-Yankees contest from 2001, best remembered for Derek Jeter’s 10th-inning walk-off homer against Byung-Hyun Kim.

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Oh, how quickly the tables were turned.

The Cubs, they of the 103 regular-season wins, entered the World Series as the presumptive favorites in the minds of nearly all who chose to be foolish enough to actually forecast the madness that is postseason baseball. The Cubs have the star power and the narrative and the Kris Bryant. That didn’t matter, because the Indians have the pitching. They have Corey Kluber and Andrew Miller, Cody Allen and Bryan Shaw. Chicago now teeters at the precipice of elimination, a hair’s breadth from breaking the hearts of Cubs fans everywhere. Joe Maddon will need to play his hand tonight perfectly, because if they don’t succeed tonight, there will be no Game Seven over which to agonize. He’ll need to save the season, and he’ll need his bullpen to do it.

Given that the Cubs have almost no margin for error at this point, they will need to maximize run prevention above all else. Cleveland will be deploying Josh Tomlin and Kluber in games Six and Seven, respectively, along with a likely heavy dosage of Miller. Runs will be at a premium. Kyle Schwarber will be back in the Chicago lineup, which will help, but there’s only so much he can do when Willson Contreras and Javy Baez are swinging at pitches thrown into the next state and Jason Heyward’s bat is on the side of a milk carton. These games will be about preventing runs, not scoring them.

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The dominant storyline of this postseason is reliever usage — well, the dominant storyline aside from the length of championship droughts, at least. Cleveland manager Terry Francona has freed himself to use elite reliever Andrew Miller when necessary rather than constrain himself to such trivial guidelines as save opportunities. Miller’s success (and Francona’s resultant success) has led people to ask whether this is a watershed moment for standard relief pitcher usage. Has Francona made it acceptable to more closely align optimal reliever usage with leverage rather than inning?

There are a few big reasons to think Miller’s 2016 postseason isn’t going to change bullpens as we know them. First of all, Miller’s contract status makes him immune from the reality that relief pitcher’s earnings are intimately tied to save totals. Like it or not, save totals are of real consequence to relief pitchers who aren’t already receiving hefty salaries. Secondly, managers can do things in the postseason that simply aren’t practical during the 162-game regular-season grind. As an example, consider: even though Francona has utilized Miller in a notably flexible relief-ace role ever since Cleveland acquired him from the Yankees at the end of July, Miller also entered a game in the sixth inning or earlier just once in his 26 regular-season appearances. In the postseason, however, he’s entered in the sixth or early in four of his nine outings.

Perhaps the biggest reason, though, that Miller’s case is unlikely to cause any immediate radical changes in bullpen management, is one discussed by an aptly titled article at ESPN.com by Sam Miller: “Cody Allen makes the Andrew Miller experiment possible”. To avoid confusion (and the resultant mass hysteria) likely to be caused by their shared surname, we’ll refer to the illustrious writer as Sam, and continue referring to the pitcher as Miller. Sam rightfully points out that the mere existence of another elite reliever is what frees up Francona to utilize Miller in such unconventional ways.

“If there were no Andrew Miller, [Cody] Allen might be the talk of this postseason… But Miller’s brilliance has ensured that Allen’s brilliance has gone overlooked. The irony is that Allen’s brilliance had ensured that Miller’s brilliance has been possible.”

Although the ship has long since sailed on making Allen “the talk of this postseason”, we still can (and should) spend some time talking about the other elite reliever who’s helped to situate Cleveland one win away from their first championship in 68 years. Allen has pitched 11.2 innings this postseason — or, to put it another way, has recorded 35 outs. Of those 35 outs, 22 have been via the strikeout — giving him a positively obscene 17.0 K/9 rate. To put that in perspective, uber-reliever Miller is sporting a 15.4 K/9 this postseason and the only reliever ever to top 17.0 K/9 in a regular season is some guy named Aroldis Chapman, who reached 17.7 K/9 in 2014.

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Remember that Josh Tomlin isn’t even really supposed to be here. Not that there’s anything wrong with him, but the Indians like Corey Kluber, and they like Trevor Bauer. They liked Danny Salazar, and they liked Carlos Carrasco. If the Indians had their druthers, Tomlin, perhaps, would be a bullpen long guy right about now. Maybe he would’ve been left off the roster entirely. Not only will Tomlin now start a game that could deliver the Indians a World Series championship — he’s going on short rest. Don’t lose sight of how the Indians are a miracle.

Of course, by name value, the Game 6 starter matchup is frightfully uneven. The Cubs are happy to be going with Jake Arrieta, because a year ago, he was maybe the best pitcher on the planet. Tomlin, meanwhile, recovered from shoulder surgery before making 10 starts. This year, Arrieta took a step back, but Tomlin basically lost his rotation spot. Go off perception, and it feels like the Cubs have a great chance of extending this all to seven. Anyone who knows anything would rather have Arrieta on the mound.

Arrieta, see, is the more talented pitcher. He’s the tougher pitcher to hit. He has higher-quality stuff. The edge Arrieta doesn’t have is in recent results. In what amounts to the most recent history, Tomlin has done a better job of pitching.

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