The Cleveland Guardians knew they needed to play their best baseball to beat the juggernaut New York Yankees in the ALCS. They didn’t even come close to doing that.
Coming into the American League Championship series, the Cleveland Guardians knew they needed to play their best baseball to beat the juggernaut New York Yankees. While the clubs had similar regular season records (94-68 for the Yankees and 92-69 for the Guardians), and similar collective ERAs ( 3.27; Cleveland: 3.64), they were very different teams.
The Yankees were 55-30 against teams with records better than .500 (that is nearly a 105-win pace). In contrast, the Guardians were 50-47, which is a 83.5-win pace. When facing tougher competition, the Yankees were far superior. Further, New York not only scored 147 more runs than their opponents, they scored 107 more runs than Cleveland. The Yankees also hit 52 more home runs than the Guardians. As such, Cleveland’s game plan going into the ALCS was to keep the Yankees in the ballpark and their run count down – that was their only chance of making it back to their first World Series since 2016.
As previously reported regarding Game 2, Cleveland simply made too many mistakes, and missed too many opportunities, to be successful in this short series. Game 5 had fewer miscues, but the ones that they had were timely and costly.
Here are just a few:
With the Guardians leading 2-0 in the bottom of the fifth, they loaded the bases with two outs. Lane Thomas – who has had more than his share of clutch hits this post-season – swung at the first pitch from Mark Leiter, Jr.
