World Series Game 1: Kluber, Indians shut out Cubs

Andrew Miller got out of two jams as the Indians defeated the in Game 1 of the World Series.

The first pitch of the 2016 World Series, the most anticipated in a decade, maybe longer, arrived at 8:10 p.m. ET and cut through the crisp 50-degree chill of a night this city needed. An hour earlier, the Cleveland Cavaliers handed out their championship rings, and a stone’s throw away the unlikely Cleveland Indians sent Corey Kluber to the mound to vex the Chicago Cubs like he had hitters throughout baseball for the previous four seasons.

That pitch, a 92-mph sinker, was a ball. The Cubs didn’t see many more. Kluber set team and World Series strikeout records within the first three innings, didn’t relent over the next three and handed the final three to the Indians’ lockdown bullpen, which stymied the Cubs in a 6-0 victory at Progressive Field that staked the Indians a 1-0 lead in the best-of-seven series.

Kluber struck out eight of the first nine Cubs he faced. Not only was it the most of any pitcher ever in the first three innings of a World Series game, it bested the Indians’ total-game record, a feat made possible more by the franchise’s dubious past than anything. And with catcher Roberto Perez socking a pair of home runs, including a three-run shot in the eighth inning that doubled the Indians’ lead and turned a close game into a laugher, Cleveland’s night got even better.

Cleveland last won a World Series in 1948, a drought that pales compared to the Cubs’ 108-year slog but nevertheless has reached Social Security age itself. The Indians’ futility, save for a spell in the 1990s, represented Cleveland’s sporting desolation every bit as much as the Browns’ and the Cavs’, even if baseball never gut-punched the city quite like football and basketball.

The pall over Cleveland lifted by the Cavs, Kluber is setting out to make 2016 a sporting year beyond imagination. His countenance is famously robotic, Kluber’s expression never changing. His mouth is closed. His nose doesn’t flare. It’s like Kluber breathes through gills or some sort of advanced apparatus mere mortals can’t conceive. The Cubs wore his glare all night and did nothing to erase it.

Following his unhittable innings, Kluber settled into inducing weak contact from the Cubs. They had mustered as many hits off him as pop-ups to the catcher (three) when Ben Zobrist led off the seventh inning with a single and Indians manager Terry Francona pulled Kluber at 88 pitches – a low enough total to allow him to pitch Game 4 on three days’ rest and set him up for a potential Game 7.

Kluber’s six shutout innings looked in peril as uber-reliever Andrew Miller walked Kyle Schwarber and allowed a single to Javier Baez to load the bases with no outs. A flyout and two strikeouts later, and Miller had disposed of the threat and left Kluber with a clean line: six innings, four hits, no runs, no walks, nine strikeouts.

The lead Cleveland had built Kluber in the early innings held up. With two outs in the first, the Indians cobbled together a rally around a single, two walks, a dribbler down the third-base line and a hit by pitch. They were 6-0 this postseason when they scored first, and here they had hung a pair of runs on Cubs starter Jon Lester, one of the great postseason pitchers of his generation.

Lester vacillated between excellence and wildness most of the night, yielding a fourth-inning bullet-shot home run by Perez, who became the first catcher since Gary Carter in 1986 to hit a pair of home runs in the World Series. While the Cubs’ bullpen allowed Cleveland to build upon its lead, the Indians’ bullpen did a yeoman’s job against a Chicago lineup that suffered its third shutout this postseason.

After running over hot coals in the seventh, Miller slithered out of the eighth when he struck out Schwarber, who was playing his first game after missing almost the entire regular season, with runners on first and third. The Cubs were 1 for 11 and struck out eight times with runners in scoring position. The ninth belonged to Cleveland closer Cody Allen, who extended he and Miller’s combined postseason scoreless streak to 22 1/3 innings.

The Indians’ tried-and-true formula – good starting pitching, good bullpen work, good-enough hitting – played itself out again, and the excitement that built over the last week was validated. Game 1 of the World Series lived up to its billing. The dream night for Cleveland, a place that for so long didn’t believe sporting dreams came true, was every bit as good as the city hoped it would be.