Cleveland
And yet when Corey Kluber walked off the mound in the seventh inning to the roar of a fully engaged Progressive Field crowd, when manager Terry Francona handed the ball to Andrew Miller — who by this point in the season practically wears a hood and carries a scythe — suddenly there was a clear and obvious road map to Cleveland’s first World Series title since 1948.
Kluber’s overwhelming effort and Miller’s continued brilliance in a series-opening 6-0 victory over the Chicago Cubs on Tuesday night didn’t just give the Indians the early advantage. It opened the possibility that Kluber, who threw just 88 pitches in his six-plus innings, could return for Game 4 on Saturday in Chicago, and then come back for what would be a seventh and deciding game back in Cleveland.
Add that to the possibility — rather, the absolute certainty — that Francona will entrust the most significant outs of any of these games to the incomparable Miller, throw in that catcher Roberto Perez hit two home runs, and the underdog Indians could continue ignoring how outsiders evaluate their chances. They have, after all, now won eight of the nine games they have played this postseason.
The key exchange Tuesday night came after Kluber allowed a leadoff single in the seventh, and Francona came to get him despite the fact he had struck out nine and walked none without allowing a run. For the fans, for the Indians themselves, this seemed natural. Miller, the lefty acquired at midseason trade with the Yankees, hadn’t allowed a run in his 11 innings of postseason work.
So here was an oddity: He walked Kyle Schwarber, the Cubs’ designated hitter returning from a six-month hiatus following a knee injury, and then allowed a single to Javier Baez to load the bases.
Miller’s response showed precisely why he has been, almost inarguably, the player who has had the biggest impact on this postseason. He got pinch hitter Willson Contreras to pop out to shallow center – a play on which the Indians might have doubled up a wandering Schwarber off second base. But Miller doesn’t need that help. With two strikes on both Addison Russell and David Ross, he unleashed his slider, which is simply unfair. Russell swung through his, and there’s no shame in that. Ross tried to check his swing, couldn’t, and there’s no shame in that, either.
And so the Indians survived the Cubs’ most significant threat — and has Kluber, who has already pitched in this postseason on short rest, almost certainly available three times. Perhaps only the Indians understand how important that could be. For a Cy Young winner and a star, Kluber has one of the game’s lowest profiles.
“I don’t know why more people don’t talk about him,” Cubs third baseman Kris Bryant said. Part of it has to be his demeanor, which fits in with the tenor the Indians try to set. He is straightforward, plain-spoken.
“Shoot, my first spring training here,” Francona said, “he was so quiet.”
That year, 2012, Kluber had a knee injury that prevented him from properly pushing off the mound, but he didn’t tell anyone. Only when the Indians called him back up from the minors did he say he had previously had arthroscopic surgery on his right knee, and the club came to understand why he had struggled.
“So I think we got glimpses of what he was made of early,” Francona said, “even before people realized what kind of pitcher he is.”
The kind of pitcher he is appeared in its best form in his biggest start. The foundation of Kluber’s repertoire is a sinking two-seam fastball that, when he’s throwing it well, has alarming movement. He can start it at the hip of a left-handed hitter and watch it dart over the plate.
“That’s a pitch I’m fascinated with,” said Trevor Bauer, Cleveland’s scheduled Game 2 starter. “I enjoy watching that, because sometimes it moves a lot, and it’s really fun to see the reactions to it.”
The Cubs couldn’t react to it early on. Only three of the first 11 men Kluber faced made contact, and through three innings, he rang up eight strikeouts. The list of pitchers who had struck out eight men in the first three innings of a World Series game? It doesn’t exist. No one had ever done it before.
This is what Kluber can do. Over the last three seasons, beginning with his Cy Young year of 2014, only Max Scherzer has more strikeouts than Kluber, and Scherzer spent two of those seasons in the National League, where the pitcher hits. But the quality of Kluber’s stuff showed in how frequently the Cubs simply walked back to the bench without offering at his pitches. When he struck out Chris Coghlan leading off the fifth, six of his nine strikeouts were looking.
With Kluber cruising, Cleveland needed only the smallest output against Cubs lefty Jon Lester, one of the best postseason pitchers of this generation. In the first inning, that’s all they got — a bouncing two-out single from Francisco Lindor, a stolen base, back-to-back walks to load the bases, and Jose Ramirez’s 60-foot dribbler up the third base line that produced Cleveland’s first run. When Lester hit Brandon Guyer, who has led the league in getting hit by a pitch the past two years, with an 0-2 cutter, the Indians were up 2-0. Perez’s laser of a solo homer in the fourth provided Cleveland with a pad run. Perez then added a three-run blast in the eighth.
So the path to victory, on Tuesday night, became clear. Miller recorded six outs, the last a strikeout of Schwarber with runners at the corners to end the eighth. Perez’s three-run bomb in the bottom of that inning allowed all of Cleveland to breathe easier. The Indians were impressive in their strategy, in their execution, in their demeanor.
More than that, though: They now have a path to victory for a championship, and the World Series is off to a rather intriguing start.