TORONTO — When Terry Francona made a trip to the hill to his surprise and weak-stomached fans’ horror with two outs in the bottom of the first, it was a unique moment in MLB post-season history: The Cleveland manager called on reliever Dan Otero to come into the game for what can be described as a "salve" situation.
The mound at the Rogers Centre resembled a crime scene—if you were channel-flipping at home you might have expected Francona to escort a forensics expert to the mound to examine the blood-splatter pattern left by the little finger on Indians starter Trevor Bauer’s right hand. He managed only 21 pitches and by the end of his outing it seemed like he was splitting open a stitch per toss.
Bauer’s pinky will take a place in lore. If it had cost Cleveland a game and brought Toronto back into this ALCS, it might be regarded as a curse. Six pitchers in the Indians’ bullpen spared the starter a special type of infamy. After the 4-2 victory over Toronto, Bauer’s finger will simply be regarded as the first MLB digit almost lost to a drone.
It seemed implausible that Francona could possibly get eight and one-third innings out of his bullpen without using a hurler in long relief but he did just that. He worked five middle men and a closer—and the closer turned out to be the team’s erstwhile set-up man. Not that all were battle-tested, at least recently. Two of the relievers were making their first appearances in the post-season. "We had a lot guys in there who were pitching simulated games the other day just to get work," said first baseman Mike Napoli.
Read the preceding paragraph again and drink it in.
For the record and in sequence, the Six Horsemen of the Jays’ 2016 Apocalypse were named Otero, Manship, McAllister, Shaw, Allen and Miller.
Of course, this shouldn’t surprise at this point. To this point in the ALCS Francona’s ingenious bullpen management overshadowed all other elements of the game.
In every major forum by every credible voice, the manager’s utter disregard for baseball’s strategic orthodoxy was hailed as genius. Those who sang his praises cited his assignment of the middle or set-up role to left-hander Andrew Miller, he of the overpowering slider. When most managers would like to deploy him as a game-finisher, Francona identified those stretches in advance of the eighth or ninth as the real high-leverage circumstances. And in those games, Francona waited until the eight or ninth to send out Cody Allen—maybe for some managers it would be a matter of seniority or some sort of pecking order, given that Allen had been with the club since Day One and Miller came over in mid-season from the Yankees.
And Indians relievers were quick to point out that their bullpen had done weird one-game wonders before and not so long ago. "We did it a bunch of times in September, whether it was by choice or something we had to do," Zach McAllister said. "We had this with the 19-inning game against Toronto [a Cleveland win in mid-summer].”
On at least one occasion, Francona had gone to this cascade of relievers out of necessity: A month ago, starter Carlos Carrasco was knocked out of a game against Detroit in the first inning by a season-ending injury to, yes, his right pinky finger. Other times, however, there wasn’t any such obvious cause. You wouldn’t necessarily be over-thinking it if you presume that Francona was testing a formula that he might prevail upon later on.
Still, Monday night was an entirely different story than those other parades from the bullpen. This time it was the crucible. It was to take them to the verge of the World Series.
After the game Francona admitted that it was a precarious ride. “If anybody has a hiccup, we probably lose," the manager said.
The first reliever summoned by Francona might have been the most critical: right hander Dan Otero, who had a brief bit of work in a single appearance in the ALDS against Boston but he was among those who pitched simulated games a couple of days before to stay sharp. By the numbers, Otero wasn’t any sort of fallback option, not with a WHIP of 0.91 and an ERA of 1.83 during the regular season, but throughout his 62 appearances he was called on the vast majority of the time for an inning or less of work.
Otero wasn’t up and throwing in the bullpen when Bauer started bleeding. That said, he wasn’t caught completely unaware. "We knew Trevor’s situation [before the game] and we knew that we had to be ready to go at any time and in any situation," Otero said.
What he didn’t know was that his name was going to be the first called and, as cold as he could be, he was going to have what he described as "the privilege of warming up in front of 60,000 screaming fans.”
Otero overshot the actual attendance by not quite 11,000, but no matter. The game could have got away from his team early.
With runners on first and second and Cleveland up 1-0, Otero managed to get out of the inning, inducing a week infield groundout from Russell Martin. Though Otero gave up a homer to Michael Saunders to lead off the second and a batter later gave up a single to Ezequiel Carrera, he managed to close out the inning by getting Ryan Goins to ground into a double play. Otero stabilized the situation.
The next call went out to Jeff Manship, making his first appearance in a real-and-not-simulated game in 16 days. Four outs later Francona waved in Zach McAllister and got in another inning of work out of another right-hander who hadn’t been used since Sept 28. Next, with one out in the fifth, Francona made the call to go to Bryan Shaw who already had three holds in the playoffs in addition to 25 in the regular season. Shaw fairly uneventfully recorded five outs but then gave up a single to Kevin Pillar to start the seventh inning. It looked like daylight for the Jays but then Francona made another trip to the mound and went to the bullpen once more.
A sense of inevitability and predictability set in, but only the former applied.
"I really didn’t know what [Francona] was going to do next," Otero says. "We might have an idea, but really I don’t think any of us do and it catches us by surprise sometimes.”
Francona had his two big finishers to call on but he had one head fake left. In a break from his recent form, the manager called on Allen to set up Miller. Allen struggled somewhat in a 21-pitch inning and survived the night’s biggest scare for Cleveland: With two on, Josh Donaldson smoked a line drive to left field that Coco Crisp slid under and dug out for the inning-ending out.
Allen recorded two very routine outs in the eighth before Francona brought in Miller, whose slider is impossible to hit when it’s in the strike zone and impossible to lay off when it misses.
The last man out of the pen was as surprised as the guy who warmed up in the spotlight in the first. "It seemed like [Allen] had settled in as the closer," Miller said. “I’m not going to lie, I was like, ‘Hey, I’m supposed to go in front of him.'”
Pundits will tell you that a manager’s biggest impact on a game is his handling of the bullpen. It’s a piece conventional wisdom if not the consensus. Last night’s game should silence any skeptics—not only because Cleveland won the game but also because Terry Francona’s team is set up perfectly for the sweep. The brief outings left every man in the Indians bullpen available for work Tuesday night—for Francona, it was effectively two games of managing in one with the World Series on the horizon.
And at the end of the night it was Bauer’s blood out on the mound but the Jays could be forgiven if they thought it was their own.