This piece, written by Baseball Prospectus’s Trevor Strunk, forms part of the main site’s comprehensive coverage of the postseason, “Playoff Prospectus”.
There are certain games in the postseason, particularly in the World Series, whose results seem scripted from the first pitch. I’m not trying to suggest that the postseason is rigged or anything fishy, of course; it’s more that some games have a feeling of inevitability about them. Baseball is a sport that, if nothing else, is wont to punish feelings of inevitability with wild upsets, but even here, there are those games that, in the third inning, make you sit back and say “Yeah, I think I see where this one is going.”
Unsurprisingly, these games usually revolve around very good pitching. There are of course those games when a team just jumps out to such a lead that mathematically, they’re unlikely to be beaten, but that’s not really in the spirit of our exercise here. Brute force can be fun in winning baseball games, but in the World Series, weird feelings and hunches rule, and that is the realm of the Unhittable Starting Pitcher. In Game 1 of the World Series, Corey Kluber of Cleveland was just that, unhittable to the point of the actual results and outs in the inning being largely pro forma.
At the beginning of the inning, we, as an audience, knew that Kluber would get through the lineup unscathed–the fear and panic of the game, at least when Kluber toed the rubber, evaporated into a blasé certainty. A blasé certainty during what was undeniably the most important start of Kluber’s life. And while baseball can of course turn on a dime, with perfect games in the eighth inning becoming heartbreaking losses, I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone–whether they’re from Chicago, Cleveland, or some neutral ground–that thought the Cubs would get to Kluber last night.
What I want to cover right now is the moment that I think we can pinpoint as the decisive “nuh-uh moment” for Kluber’s World Series gem: the moment at which Kluber effectively simmed ahead to the seventh-inning appearance of Andrew Miller in Cleveland’s 6-0 victory: his consecutive strikeouts of Cubs center fielder Dexter Fowler and third baseman Kris Bryant in the top of the third inning.
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Lead photo courtesy Elsa—USA Today Sports.