Andrew Miller

Andrew Miller signed with the New York Yankees in December 2014 as a reliever nobody outside the front office was fully sold on yet, and by the middle of 2016 he was one-third of the best bullpen trio baseball had seen in years. Then the Yankees traded him away at the deadline, and he went and won an ALCS MVP for somebody else. That's baseball for you (or at least that's 2016 for you).

From Failed Starter to Elite Reliever

Miller wasn't an overnight thing. Detroit took him 6th overall in the 2006 draft out of North Carolina, where he'd set the school's career strikeout record, and he spent five seasons bouncing between Detroit and Florida (after the Cabrera-Willis trade sent him to the Marlins in December 2007) trying to stick as a starter. It didn't take. He finished 10-20 with a 5.89 ERA in 58 games for Florida, walking guys at an alarming clip, and bottomed out in 2010 with an 8.54 ERA in 32.2 innings (that's not a typo, and yes, it's ugly). Boston picked him up in 2011 and kept running him out as a starter too, with similarly rough results -- 6-3, 5.54 ERA over 65 innings that year.

2012 is when it finally clicked. Miller didn't make the Red Sox rotation out of spring training, so he moved to the bullpen just to stay on a big-league roster -- and immediately looked like a different pitcher, posting a 3.35 ERA in 53 appearances that year. The Red Sox flipped him to Baltimore at the 2014 deadline, and between the two stops that season he ran a 2.02 ERA with 103 strikeouts against just 17 walks in 62.1 innings. That's the version of Miller the Yankees signed.

The Yankees Signed Him, Then He Signed Away Money

New York gave Miller a four-year, $36 million deal that December, making him the highest-paid non-closing reliever in the sport's history at the time. The funny part: the Yankees' first offer was four years and $32 million, and they only bumped it after learning Miller had a four-year, $40 million offer sitting on the table somewhere else. He signed with the Yankees anyway and left roughly $4 million on the table to do it (say what you want about the Steinbrenner-era front office, but that's a heck of a recruiting pitch).

He didn't wait long to cash in on that bet, either. Miller and Dellin Betances technically shared 9th-inning duty out of camp in 2015, but Miller pitched well enough, fast enough, that manager Joe Girardi handed him the closer's job outright by mid-May. He opened his Yankees career with a 17.2-inning scoreless streak. By the time anyone scored on him, he'd already banked 13 saves. He finished 2015 with 36 saves, a 2.04 ERA, and the Mariano Rivera AL Reliever of the Year Award -- not bad for a guy who couldn't hold a big-league rotation spot three years earlier.

No Runs DMC

The 2016 season complicated things in the best possible way. Aroldis Chapman opened that year serving a 30-game suspension under MLB's domestic violence policy, so Miller closed again to start the season. When Chapman came back in May, Girardi didn't strip the ninth inning from him -- he moved Miller into a setup role instead, and Miller, by all accounts, didn't fight it (he said publicly he didn't care who got the saves as long as the team won).

That's when Dellin Betances, Miller, and Aroldis Chapman became "No Runs DMC" -- Betances's first name plus his teammates' last names, a nickname a writer named Diane Firstman coined that got popular enough for the Yankees to license it from Run-D.M.C. itself and sell it on $40 T-shirts. The trio combined for 41 saves and a 2.35 ERA across 148 appearances that year, striking out roughly 42% of every hitter they faced. It's genuinely one of the best bullpen stretches in franchise history, and it lasted about three months before the front office blew it up.

Miller made his first career All-Star team that July, riding a 1.38 ERA through the break. He finished his half-season with the Yankees at 6-1, nine saves, and a 1.39 ERA across 44 appearances -- setup man numbers that looked a lot like closer numbers, because that's basically what he was.

Traded at the Deadline

On July 31, 2016, with New York fading in the AL East, Brian Cashman shipped Miller to Cleveland for a four-player package: outfielder Clint Frazier, left-hander Justus Sheffield, and right-handers Ben Heller and J.P. Feyereisen. It was part of a full sell-off that week -- the Yankees had already dealt Chapman to the Cubs six days earlier for a package built around Gleyber Torres, and they'd flip Carlos Beltran to Texas the following day. New York hadn't been sellers at the deadline since trading Rickey Henderson in 1989. Frazier and Sheffield ranked as Cleveland's No. 1 and No. 5 prospects at the time, which tells you how much the rest of baseball still believed in Miller's arm even in a contract year.

Cleveland's bet wasn't just on two months of a dominant lefty arm -- Miller's four-year deal still had two full seasons left on it after 2016, so the Indians were buying the stretch run plus two more affordable years of a shutdown reliever, and they paid two of their best prospects to get all of it. From the other side of it, Cashman turned more than two years of contract obligation into younger, cost-controlled talent -- Frazier hung around the Bronx as an up-and-down outfielder for parts of five seasons (concussions and vertigo cost him more time than any pitcher ever did), and Sheffield became the headline name in the trade package that later brought James Paxton to the Bronx. Either way, breaking up "No Runs DMC" after one summer together still stings a little watching it back.

The October Cleveland Never Forgot

Here's the part that makes Yankees fans wince: Miller went to Cleveland and had maybe the best month of relief pitching anyone's had in the modern postseason. Terry Francona stopped treating him like a normal reliever entirely, bringing him into games in the 5th or 6th inning whenever the leverage called for it instead of holding him for a save situation that might never come.

It worked. Cleveland swept Boston in the ALDS (Miller struck out 7). Against Toronto in the ALCS, Miller threw 7.2 shutout innings across four games, struck out 14 of the 26 batters he faced -- an ALCS strikeout record for a reliever -- and picked up a four-out save in Game 3. He won ALCS MVP, becoming just the second non-closer ever to win a postseason MVP award (Rob Dibble did it for the Reds back in 1990). Then in the World Series against the Cubs, he pitched in four of the seven games, struck out nine over 7.2 innings, and won Game 3. Cleveland still lost that series in seven games -- Chicago finally ended its 108-year title drought -- but nothing about the loss was Miller's fault. His full 2016 postseason line: 2-0, 1.40 ERA, 30 strikeouts in 19.1 innings across 10 appearances.

Cleveland fans got the version of Andrew Miller that changed how teams think about bullpen usage entirely -- the multi-inning fireman, deployed by leverage instead of by inning number. Yankees fans got two years of him, one championship-caliber trio, and a "what could've been" that ages fine in hindsight, since Sheffield turned into a rotation piece the Yankees flipped for more talent and Frazier stuck around the Bronx outfield picture for years after Miller left. Feels about right for 2016.