The Yankees and the Houston Astros do not miss much. Their American League Championship Series matches two data-savvy organizations with rosters of superstars designed to win in October. But even when teams are saturated with information, they can have different beliefs on how to reach a common goal.
Consider Gerrit Cole, who started Game 3 for the Astros at Yankee Stadium on Tuesday. In his previous playoff start, the division series clincher against Tampa Bay, Cole worked eight innings. The Yankees have played 28 postseason games since one of their starters went that deep in a game.
The last to do it for the Yankees was C.C. Sabathia, who pitched a complete game to eliminate the Baltimore Orioles — yes, they were once a playoff team — in the 2012 division series. In two years and 10 postseason games under Manager Aaron Boone before Tuesday, Yankees starters had averaged less than four innings per start.
To be precise, they had collected only 117 outs, or 11.7 per game, and only once lasted more than five innings. That was in Game 1 of this series, when Masahiro Tanaka worked six innings, throwing 68 pitches, and called it a night.
“One of the strengths of our club is the depth of our bullpen,” Boone said. “And we probably rely on the 12, 13 pitchers that we have more so than most teams that tend to be a little more top-heavy.”
With Cole, Justin Verlander and Zack Greinke, the Astros are clearly top-heavy. So are the Washington Nationals, who have flourished in the National League playoffs behind Max Scherzer, Stephen Strasburg, Patrick Corbin and Anibal Sanchez.
There is no one way to win in October, but the wealthiest teams have choices. The Astros traded 12 players to get Verlander, Cole and Greinke, who combined to earn more than $73 million this season. The Nationals committed $369 million in free agency for Scherzer, Corbin and Sanchez, and another $175 million in a contract extension for Strasburg.
The Yankees made heavy investments in their bullpen, the contracts for Aroldis Chapman, Zack Britton and Adam Ottavino all ranking among the 10 most lucrative deals for pitchers who were relievers at the time they signed. Those three earn an average of $39.2 million per season, and the Yankees supported them with two other top relievers in Chad Green and Tommy Kahnle.
It was hard to argue with the strategy. The best way to stifle the opponent is with strikeouts, and the Yankees were the only team in the majors to have four relievers with at least 11 strikeouts per nine innings (minimum 55 innings pitched) — Chapman, Green, Kahnle and Ottavino. The exception was Britton, whose power sinker is all but impossible for hitters to lift.
“It’s definitely a new trend lately,” Kahnle said. “To go to the bullpen early is definitely one of our strengths on the team, and I think Boone has done a great job of utilizing that. He’s just trying any way to get the end goal, which is the W at the end of the day, and being able to use us early in games, it’s not going to really affect us. We’ve been doing it almost all year.”
The risk for the Yankees is that, eventually, the seasoned Houston hitters could benefit from repeated looks at the same relievers.
“When you have so many good bullpen arms that you’re not dipping in quality at any point when you use eight or nine guys in a game, that’s an incredible approach,” Astros General Manager Jeff Luhnow said. “Our hitters are never going to see the same pitcher twice. That being said, as the series rolls on, you get deeper and you’ve seen the guys three or four times.
“Like in Game 5 against Tampa, for most of the pitchers that came in, it was either their third or fourth appearance, and the pendulum starts to swing back to the hitters, I think. Maybe that’s why we were able to get some runs against Tampa.”
Barring a rainout, the Yankees and the Astros could both be forced to use an array of pitchers in Game 4 on Wednesday. The Astros’ fourth starter in the regular season, Wade Miley, struggled late in the season and was left off the A.L.C.S. roster. Their fifth starter, Aaron Sanchez, had a shoulder operation in September. So the bulk of Game 4 could fall to the rookie Jose Urquidy, who had never pitched above Class A before this season.
The Yankees are more used to a bullpen game, with Green their usual opener. But the strategy can be challenging, Astros Manager A.J. Hinch explained, because the more pitchers a team uses, the greater the chance that someone will falter.
“Once you start that, you can’t stop,” Hinch said. “Once you start the matchup-friendly approach, you run into a bad matchup eventually. If you have a right-handed specialist, there’s going to be lefties in the lineup. If you have a lefty that you don’t want to face a righty, you’re going to run into a righty, and you start rifling through your pitching a little bit.
“It is hard to get everybody perfectly lined up and perfectly matched up. The game often changes. It’s way easier to do it on paper than it is in practice.”
Hinch added: “But I think the mental grind that it takes on the hitters to always give them different looks, it takes great discipline to just stay with it. What do you do when guys get hot from a pitching standpoint and they look like they’ve got their best stuff?”
For Hinch, it was a rhetorical question. The Astros’ bullpen had a better earned run average than the Yankees’ this season (3.75 to 4.51), and relievers Roberto Osuna, Will Harris and Joe Smith have been sharp lately. But elite starters remain the most valuable commodity in the game, and when they are rolling, let them roll.
“You look at what Washington’s doing right now,” Luhnow said. “They’ve got some good offense going, but it’s on the backs of those incredible pitchers. If you have a good rotation, you’re going to be in great shape in the playoffs. But the model continues to change, and teams evolve with what they have.”