For the second straight game, Andrew Miller faced six batters and struck out five
They say baseball is a game of adjustments, but sometimes it's a game of waiting for your opponent to make the adjustment. Right now, Major League hitters appear thoroughly incapable of adjusting to Andrew Miller's obscenely good slider. As long as they keep failing to hit it, is there any reason for him to do anything but continue to make hitters look silly with it?
During Game 1 of the ALCS, Miller faced six Blue Jays and struck out five of them -- using his slider for the third strike all five times. That's a pretty solid rate of recording strikeouts. One might even say that's a great rate of recording strikeouts.
It would appear that Miller enjoyed that Game 1 performance, because in Game 2, he went out and did the same exact thing, again.
Here he is striking out five in Game 1:
Now here he is striking out five of the six batters he faced in Game 2:
Sure, they look practically identical, but I assure you those are different clips from different games. All in all, that's 10 sliders for 10 strikeouts over the span of 3 2/3 innings of work.
It's not supposed to look this easy, but that's not stopping Miller. He is now up to 16 career postseason innings pitched and is still yet to allow his first postseason run.
Miller will head to Toronto to try to continue his dominance of the Blue Jays in Game 3 on Monday at 8 p.m. ET on TBS and Sportsnet (Canada).