TORONTO – In the days leading up to Game 3 of the American League Championship Series, when Trevor Bauer sat in the Cleveland Indians’ trainer’s room getting treatment on his mangled right pinky, he kept asking the medical staff to use a soldering iron and burn shut the wound he suffered at a hotel when a drone he was repairing went haywire and sliced his finger from the nail to second knuckle. They laughed, even though they understood Bauer was dead serious and regretted not cauterizing it himself the night of the injury.

“I even had a soldering iron in my hotel room,” Bauer said. “Instead of going to the ER, I probably should’ve sealed it closed myself.”

Had Bauer done so, he may well have robbed the ALCS of the instantly iconic moment that unfolded fewer than 20 pitches into Game 3. (Not to mention risked infection, burns and other undesirable conditions.) Because major league rules prohibit any foreign substance on a pitcher’s hand, Bauer could not wear the gauze that snuggled his pinky in the days since the injury. All dried blood and stitches and awfulness, like a Walking Dead gore bomb except totally real, Bauer’s exposed pinky grossed out teammates and TV audiences alike, and that was before it started to bleed on the mound.

Four batters into the game, drip, drip, drip it went, torture for Bauer, who understood what it meant. Toronto Blue Jays manager John Gibbons asked home-plate umpire Brian Gorman to look at the finger, and out of the Indians’ dugout came manager Terry Francona, who said: “It’s not that bad!” At which point Gorman pointed to the pool of blood on the mound and stains all over Bauer’s pants and shoes and said: “That’s a lot of blood.” Which prompted Bauer to scream “F—!” because he knew he was done after only two outs.

And all of this, if you can believe, was a mere preamble of what was to come. Because the ensuing three hours, two minutes, the direct result of a single propeller on a quadcopter drone throttling when it shouldn’t have, offered an all-time great managing effort, which is saying something for Terry Francona, the man who stood in the dugout when the Boston Red Sox won their first championship in 86 years.

Trevor Bauer had to leave in the first inning because of his bloody pinky. (AP) More

This – this was a win with an ordinary score, 4-2, in a game that was anything but ordinary. This was a manager who had been lauded for his bullpen usage during this postseason offering his piece de resistance: a seven-pitcher evening of cobbled-together madness in which every lever he pulled came up BAR BAR BAR. This was the Indians’ sixth victory in six playoff games this season, and their third in an ALCS they can finish off Tuesday at 4 p.m. ET with ace Corey Kluber on the mound. This was the pure, distilled embodiment of a manager, a team and an organization with philosophies so aligned they could go 100,000 miles without a rotation – or at least a month, which they’ve done since the injuries to Carlos Carrasco, Danny Salazar and now Bauer forced Francona to improvise and ad-lib like a player at the Upright Citizens Brigade.

“As a reliever, it’s almost the worst thing that can happen to your day, when you see the starter come out early,” Indians fireman Andrew Miller said. “Whether it’s because of injury or ineffectiveness or whatever, it means you’ve got a lot on your plate.”

By 11:32 p.m., when Miller retired the last batter in his four-out save, Francona had licked that plate clean. When Bauer walked off the mound, Miller, closer Cody Allen and setup man Bryan Shaw were in the Indians’ trainer’s room, where they often huddle in the early innings of the game. They saw Bauer’s hand. They understood the inevitability of his removal. And none of them panicked.

“We trust Tito,” Allen said. “He’s pretty dang good at running the show. So we’re going to go with what he says.”

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