In December 2010, the Boston Red Sox traded for a mediocre left-handed starting pitcher with a career 5.84 ERA, the transaction barely causing a blip on the Hot Stove League’s radar. Just 25 years old, the pitcher had already been given up on by two teams that had made far bigger investments in him. He was just another big-armed lefty who couldn’t keep the ball over the plate; modern baseball history is scattered with the remains of thousands just like him.
That this same pitcher, Andrew Miller, would now be considered the most valuable weapon in the entire 2016 postseason – someone teams are willing to mortgage large chunks of their future to acquire – is something of a baseball miracle. As a hybrid lefty set-up man/bullpen ace/multi-inning fireman, Miller, now 31, has helped carry the Cleveland Indians to a berth in the American League Championship Series, where they will face the Toronto Blue Jays beginning with Game 1 tonight in Cleveland.
Someone else will throw the first and last pitches each night, but at some point, the ALCS will go through Miller – most likely multiple times, for multiple innings. It was that way in the AL Division Series, a three-game sweep of the Red Sox, where he entered in the fifth inning of Game 1 and retired six batters to carry the lead to the late innings, and again in the clinching Game 3, when he entered in the sixth and delivered six more critical outs.
Over the past three Octobers, pitching for three different teams, Miller has logged 12 postseason innings without allowing an earned run, while striking out 17 batters and walking only three. Six of his eight appearances have been for four or more outs. He is quite simply the surest thing in October.
“I know sometimes people don’t think a reliever can impact your team as much as a player position (can). I would argue that point,” said Indians Manager Terry Francona, speaking of the July trade in which the Indians gave up four prospects to acquire Miller from the New York Yankees. “He has been everything we hoped for. We gave up a lot of good players for him. That’s how much we think of Andrew.”
Francona plays a central role in Miller’s stunning rise from middling starter to lockdown reliever. It was Francona who, as the Red Sox’s manager at the time, watched Miller labor through five aimless innings in Toronto on Sept. 8, 2011 – the sixth time in a span of seven starts in which Miller had failed to complete the sixth inning – and decided he had seen enough. It would be the last start of Miller’s career. Francona shifted him to the bullpen for good, and Miller has gone 22-12 with a 2.18 ERA since then.
“The idea was that he would try to work on simplifying some things,” Francona said, recalling that period. “I don’t know in my wildest dreams that we ever imagined him being this good. It’s amazing what confidence and repetition can do.”
And it is Francona who, along with Miller himself, is exploding the accepted notions of bullpen usage before our eyes, creating a possible prototype for a new/old type of reliever – one that has more in common with the “firemen” of the 1970s than the one-inning set-up men of today.
This postseason has seen the game undergo a new examination of bullpen usage. When Francona turned to Miller with two outs in the fifth inning of Game 1 of the ALDS, it was viewed in some corners as a radical move – Miller hadn’t pitched that early in a game since 2013, and he would not be available to pitch in his more customary role in the eighth inning.
But in another corner of the baseball world, the move made perfect sense. That fifth inning, with the Indians protecting a one-run lead and the heart of the Red Sox’s order coming to the plate, represented some of the highest-leverage situations in that game. What better time to use your best pitcher? The sense of drama was only heightened by the contrast between Francona’s aggressive moves and Buck Showalter’s infamous refusal to use his best pitcher, closer Zach Britton, days earlier as the Baltimore Orioles’ season unraveled in the wild-card game.
“Bullpens are kind of being adjusted right now,” Miller said. As statistical analysis becomes more sophisticated, he said, “we realize there’s bigger moments in the game than the eighth and ninth inning, and that can be appreciated. The playoffs are a different animal.”
Miller gives Francona and the Indians a weapon no one else in this postseason has, because there is no one else in baseball like Miller – a 6-foot-7 lefty who has the repertoire of a Randy Johnson and the command of a Tom Glavine. His remarkable transformation from awful starter to historic reliever is best observed and explained through his walk rates: 5.7 walks per nine innings in 2011, his last year as a starter, then 4.5 in 2012, his first full year as a reliever. By 2014, he was down to 2.5, and this year it was 1.1.
“Miserable,” Indians teammate Jason Kipnis said, when asked what it was like to face Miller in previous years. “Especially as a lefty hitter. I know what those pitches look like. I’ve faced them. I’ve walked back to the dugout with my head down. It’s not a fun at-bat for lefties, or for anybody.”
The Indians, who lost two of their top three starting pitchers to injuries in September, must now deal with an explosive Blue Jays offense, which entered Thursday having hit twice as many homers – 10 – in this postseason as any other team, while averaging nearly seven runs per game.
But in their bullpen, Francona and the Indians have a weapon unlike any other, one capable of tilting the series back in their direction at any time. They will deploy Miller. The only questions are how and when.