Ken Blaze-USA TODAY Sports
You can never have too much starting pitching, they say, but prior to this season the New York Mets and Cleveland Indians surely thought they had enough. The Mets started the year with four young co-aces ready to build on 2015's NL pennant; the Indians had what may have been the AL's best staff, with recent Cy Young winner Cory Kluber joined by three other electric arms.On Saturday, each team—having already taken hits in the starting-pitching department—saw another arm go down. In Cleveland, Carlos Carrasco's second pitch of the afternoon turned into an Ian Kinsler line drive that smashed into Carrasco's right hand, fracturing his pinkie and ending his season. In New York, the news came prior to first pitch that Jacob deGrom had felt elbow discomfort following a bullpen session and would likely be done for the year as well. Carrasco joins Danny Salazar on Cleveland's list of not-likely-to-returns, and deGrom sits on New York's shelf with Matt Harvey and Steven Matz, the last of whom may resume his on-again-off-again year later this week.The most immediate and obvious outcome of the weekend's events is that both teams will enter the postseason—should they make it, in the Mets' case—with severely depleted versions of the rosters that got them there. Cleveland's number-two now figures to be the mercurial Trevor Bauer, he of the byzantine warm-up regimen and mid-four ERA, and the Indians will give some starts to Josh Tomlin, who surrendered two more homers while you read this sentence. New York's troubles at least come with a jolly side-effect: Bartolo Colon, relegated to bullpen duty when the Mets were at full strength last October, will work as a starter if they advance past the Wild Card game.While both teams ran into plain old lousy luck on Saturday, they also demonstrated the dangers inherent to a certain type of team-building. Today's baseball is dominated by power arms, and by injuries to those same arms. Combine this reality with the prevailing wisdom that pitching wins in October, and focusing on assembling deep starting rotations seems like the way to go. But even the most well-stocked staffs are only a couple injuries away from disaster, and those couple injuries (even if Carrasco's came on a freak play unrelated to shoulder or elbow issues) are more common than ever.The usual mode of postseason previewing, which now starts sometime just after Opening Day and continues apace until the playoffs actually come into view, centers on starting pitcher matchups. The Giants might be struggling, but I don't want to see Bumgarner-Cueto in games 1 and 2 if I'm any other team, that sort of thing. In this context, teams like the Mets and Indians can seem sturdy, and a bat-happy team like the Red Sox gets the short shrift. Drew Pomeranz just doesn't inspire the same confidence slotted into a graphics box.One benefit of the Boston approach, though, is peace of mind. Two weeks out from postseason play, they can say with some degree of assurance that their best players will still be around when the games count for more. Can anyone else be so sure?