WHO CAN STOP CUBS? MAYBE MILLER
Indians reliever’s slider might hold key to the Series
It was only days ago when Clayton Kershaw looked like an unmovable force in the Chicago Cubs’ path. He was going to stop them from steamrolling their way through October or at least slow them enough to extend the National League Championship Series to Game 7. Look at how that worked out — the Los Angeles Dodgers ace was the one who got pancaked. It made you wonder: If Kershaw’s legendary curveball couldn’t throttle the Cubs, what can?
This is another way of asking whether Andrew Miller can be the postseason difference-maker Kershaw wasn’t. True, these are two different pitchers with different mechanics and different weapons. One is a starter, the other a reliever. We got that.
But it’s also a fact that Miller separated the Indians from the Boston Red Sox and Toronto Blue Jays on the strength of a slider that hitters unashamedly admit they can’t touch. New York Yankees fans aren’t surprised. Miller was lights-out all summer before being dealt to Cleveland and totaled 123 strikeouts in 741⁄ innings in the regular season. But now he’s coming up against baseball’s hottest team and, if you believe in such things, the one currently favored by the gods.
Think the Cubs aren’t special? Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said, “They have no weaknesses,” and were so aggressive against Kershaw they accomplished what would otherwise have been a miracle — they took away his signature dominance of the inside corner against right-handed hitters.
That’s why this showdown is critical to the Indians’ chances. Manager Terry Francona has made it clear he’s willing to use Miller not just as a closer or in a setup role, but in any circumstance in any inning. That’s how much Francona trusts Miller’s slider lately. It breaks in wide, round-house fashion, not unlike a Frisbee, and then appears to accelerate, down and in, as it nears the plate.
That’s how most left-handed sliders dance, but Miller’s is unique for several reasons, and that explains why he had struck out more than half of the hitters he’d faced in the postseason heading into the Series.
First, Miller has exceptional velocity, averaging just under 95 mph this season with his fastball. That alone makes hitters uncomfortable and leaves them fewer resources to guard against that big-breaking slider. The Toronto Blue Jays’ Russell Martin said exactly that during the Amer- ican League Championship Series, telling reporters, “Trying to catch up to 96 and then having to adjust to the sweeping slider like (Miller) has is tough. It looks like a strike for a really long time and then it darts out of the zone.”
Point No. 2: Because he’s 6-7 and has such long arms, Miller has a whip-like action to his delivery and creates phenomenal spin rate on the ball. Against the Blue Jays, his slider was averaging close to 2,800 revolutions per minute, which accounts not just for the pitch’s enormous break, but also how late it moves.
That’s what Martin meant about Miller creating a darting action on his slider. It looks like a strike until it’s too late for the hitter to realize it’s not. Thing is, Miller can throw the pitch anywhere he wants, on either corner or violently down and in, so that it practically lands atop a righthanded hitter’s back foot.
Pinpoint control is the goal of all professional pitchers, although the rule of thumb is: The less the ball moves, the easier it is to direct. That’s why so many hurlers resort to four-seam fastballs when they fall behind in the count 3-0. Even the high-velocity cut fastball, patented by Yankees legend Mariano Rivera and currency featured by the Dodgers’ Kenley Jansen, is relatively easy to harness because of its modest lateral movement.
But Miller? He’s got no busi- ness being a strike zone surgeon, not with a pitch that sprints like it’s been hijacked by a wind shear. In some ways Miller’s slider resembles Jeff Nelson’s from in the 1990s, except the big right-hander had difficulty throwing it for a strike. That’s why Miller is such a threat, because he’s so rarely in bad counts.
How does Miller hold the pitch? Surprisingly, he bucks conventional wisdom by gripping the ball across the narrow seams instead of alongside the horseshoe.
“I found that it was easier to pull down that way,” Miller said over the summer. “Same grip as the fastball, just a slightly different action at the end.”
What Miller modestly didn’t mention is that his slider and fastball come from the same arm slot with the same arm speed. There’s nothing to alert the hitter that this nuclear weapon is on the way. Nor does Miller’s delivery have any particular timing mechanism for a hitter to lock onto: no big leg kick, no dramatic pause, nothing.
Miller instead takes a quick jab step toward the plate and fires away, a billboard of simplicity.
“Trust me, you wouldn’t say my delivery was simple if you saw me pitch in college (at North Carolina),” he said with a laugh. “I finally wised up when Fernando Rodney was picking up all those saves (133 from 2012 to 214). He basically had no windup and still no one could hit him. It made me reconsider my own mechanics. I decided to simplify.”
We’ll see to what degree Miller’s arsenal translates against a Cubs lineup that destroyed Kershaw. It’s one of a million reasons why it will be impossible to take your eyes off this World Series. It’s not just Miller against the Cubs, of course, but Miller against Aroldis Chapman. Slider vs. heat, exYankee against ex-Yankee.
Still, at the moment of truth, Miller won’t be thinking about the Cuban-born closer, but about launching the slider on the hands of Javier Baez or Addison Russell or Kris Bryant. Can Miller consistently succeed where Kershaw failed?
Answer that, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of who’ll prevail in this historic Fall Classic.
Klapisch writes for The (Bergen County, N.J.) Record, part of the USA TODAY Network.