Cleveland’s Bullpen Has Thrown 47 Innings This October. The Rays Just Tied the ALCS.
Cleveland’s bullpen has thrown 47 innings this postseason, more than any other team in baseball, and the Guardians are handing a rookie the most important start of their season.
The Rays beat them 7-3 at Progressive Field on Saturday to tie the ALCS at two games apiece, in a game that only landed on Saturday because Friday’s rain washed it out. Game 5 is set for 5 p.m. ET Sunday in Cleveland, and the arithmetic has turned against the home team.
The innings gap is the series
Forty-seven innings for Cleveland. Twenty-four and a third for Tampa Bay. Cade Smith and Hunter Gaddis have each pitched seven times this month, tied for the most appearances by any pitcher in the playoffs. Stephen Vogt opened Game 4 with Shawn Armstrong for a single inning, asked Foster Griffin to carry three and two-thirds behind him, and still needed six arms to finish.
Nick Martinez, 35, gave the Rays 5 1/3 innings on two hits and one run and retired 11 straight hitters in the middle of it. That is close to the whole difference between these two staffs right now.
Vogt is not conceding anything. “Now, it’s a three-game series,” he said. “I’d put our guys up against any team in the world in a three-game series.”
Caminero and Diaz finally hit
Junior Caminero and Yandy Diaz had gone a combined 5-for-34 with one RBI through three games. Caminero, 22, broke the tie in the sixth with a double off the left-field wall that MLB.com measured at 110.2 mph. Diaz put the game out of reach with a two-run homer in the ninth.
Jonathan Aranda went 3-for-4 with two runs and two RBI, and his seventh-inning ground ball got past the Cleveland defense to score two more. Richie Palacios also had three hits. Travis Bazzana, the first pick of the 2024 draft, homered for Cleveland and was charged with an error. Chase DeLauter drove in a run and made an error of his own. The Guardians committed two; the Rays none.
Jose Ramirez went 0-for-3. Steven Kwan dove into first base in the seventh, split his lip open, and came back out the next half-inning with gauze in his mouth.
Kwan was blunt about the rest of it. “We didn’t play fundamental baseball,” he said. “We didn’t handle the ball.”
What Sunday decides
Parker Messick, a rookie left-hander who went 12-9 with a 2.56 ERA in the regular season, draws Game 5 after the rain moved him up from Game 6. He has walked eight men in 11 2/3 postseason innings, which is the number to watch. Tampa Bay counters with Drew Rasmussen, 16-5 with a 2.67 ERA, on his normal turn.
In best-of-seven series tied 2-2, the Game 5 winner has gone on to take the series 46 times in 69 tries, about 67 percent. If this one goes the distance, Games 6 and 7 are Monday and Tuesday at Tropicana Field with no travel day in between, which means four games in four days for the most heavily used bullpen in the sport.
Milwaukee is waiting. The Brewers swept the Dodgers in the NLCS and have not played since October 15, so they will have had eight days off before Game 1 of the World Series on October 23 in Milwaukee.
Kevin Cash’s team knows this shape. The Rays have never won a World Series, and the last time they got close, in 2020, they had that series tied 2-2 after Game 4 and lost the final two. Cleveland has not won a title since 1948, the longest active drought in the sport. One of these clubs carries that into next weekend, and the bullpen math says it will probably be Tampa Bay.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
