I wrote last week about the Yankees' plan to bring Luis Gil back as a bullpen weapon, and the more I sit with it, the more I like it. The Big Lead is calling him a secret weapon for October. They're not wrong, though I'd argue he's only a secret to people who weren't watching the AL Rookie of the Year race a couple years back. The rest of us saw the fastball.

That fastball is the whole story here. Gil was sitting upper 90s as a starter, touching 100 when he needed a big one. Now take that arm, shorten the leash, and let him air it out for one inning instead of nursing it through six. The stuff plays up. It always does. Relievers who come from the rotation almost always gain a tick or two when they stop pacing themselves, and Gil was already throwing cheese nobody wanted to see twice in a lineup.

If you want the template, it's an old one. The Giants turned a young starter named Madison Bumgarner loose in the 2014 playoff run and rode him to a title. Randy Johnson closed games in the 2001 World Series. Even the Yankees did a version of this with Joba Chamberlain back in 2007, when the Joba Rules were the talk of baseball. It didn't end the way Yankees fans wanted, but the idea was sound: a power arm with starter's stuff, deployed in short bursts, is a nightmare matchup in a playoff series where you see the same hitters three and four times in a week.

That last part matters more than people realize. October baseball is a repetition game. Hitters get familiar with you fast when they see you in Games 1, 4, and 7. A reliever they only see once, with starter-quality breaking stuff and a 99 mph heater, breaks that whole rhythm. Dave Morgan and his spreadsheet friends would probably show you swing-rate numbers on high fastballs to prove the point. Fine. My eyes have said the same thing since Gil's rookie year: hitters don't square that ball up, they survive it.

The health question is the real one. Gil's coming back from rehab, and we've all seen guys whose velocity takes a half-season to come all the way back because the arm doesn't trust itself yet. If the fastball comes back at full bore, the Yankees have themselves an eighth-inning answer they didn't have to trade for. If it doesn't, they've got a talented arm who can still give them multi-inning coverage in lower-leverage spots while he rounds into shape. Either way, this is a better roster than it was two weeks ago.

Deep runs are built on this stuff. Everybody's got superstars in October. The teams still playing in late October are the ones with a third pitcher they trust in a tight seventh inning, the guy the other manager has to game-plan for. The Yankees just might have found theirs without giving up a single prospect.

Keep an eye on the radar gun his first few appearances. That'll tell you everything.