The Milwaukee Brewers have a difficult decision on their hands. Brandon Woodruff, one of the team’s best starters and past postseason heroes, hasn’t pitched in a game since the Fourth of July, an outing that saw him pulled with two outs in the fourth, unable to throw a fastball. The report afterwards was the dreaded shoulder discomfort, and after a couple of weeks and a couple of inspections, he submitted himself to season-ending right shoulder capsule surgery.

Except that it wasn’t, somehow. A month later, Woodruff began a throwing program, and a month after that he was targeting an optimistic (on multiple levels) World Series return. At least half of that optimism turns out to have been justified. Now, with the deadline looming, with some bullpens and a live BP under his belt—he threw between 90 and 92 mph, a hair under where he sat all year—Matt Arnold and Pat Murphy will have to perform some heavy math. Roster rules declare that “a club may request permission from the commissioners’s office to replace a player who is injured during the course of the series,” which is just loose enough a wording to allow for multiple interpretations. If Woodruff were to suffer a setback after being placed on the roster, is that a new injury? Is it a recurrence of an existing injury? What are the odds the league rejects the application? Is Woodruff’s upside worth the potential risk of playing a man short, 170 games into the season?

We don’t know. Arnold and Murphy barely know, with all the information at their disposal; all they can do is extrapolate, filter the data through their minds and hearts. And the calculation isn’t as simple as assembling the best 26 players on the roster, comparing Woodruff to whichever reliever they’d have to drop, estimating the odds of the former being healthy and effective, and landing on a number. There are other factors, as teams have demonstrated all October.