The Cleveland Guardians have had an up-and-down season already this year. And we aren’t out of the first month. Beating Pittsburgh Ace Paul Skenes in Pittsburgh is a great way to get the season jump-started. This win proves that Cleveland’s formula for victory can work. The starter has to go five innings. The bullpen can go match-up by match-up. Cleveland has to play great defense. And the offense has to do enough to win. That is so far how the Cleveland Guardians have been winning games.
The starting pitching for the Cleveland Guardians has been awesome this year. Cleveland starters have been consistently getting to the 5th, 6th and 7th innings. Which keeps the pressure off the bullpen. And keeps our bullpen arms fresh and ready to go. Cleveland starters’ statistics may not be that impressive. But they are doing what they need to do. Namingly, leaving the game leaves the club a good chance to win. If a starter goes out in the 7th inning, with the club down one run, he has done his job. As long as the starter leaves with the club in the game, he has done what the club has paid him to do.
The Cleveland bullpen has been awesome, like usual. Our last two managers really know how to pull the strings to make a bullpen work. Whatever magic we have in Cleveland, we need to keep going. The Guardians have had an awesome bullpen for a number of years. Which keeps away bad memories of all the blown leads in years past. Our older fans might remember the 1990s Indians who did not even win one World Series despite featuring an All-Star team every year. And the culprit was a bullpen that surrendered leads on a regular basis. The modern-day team has the opposite problem. Our guys don’t hit 50 home runs on a regular basis. But we sure don’t give up a lot of runs either. It leads to a lot more victories.
Steven Vogt has proven to be a worthy successor to Terry Francona. Whatever magic he learned from Francona has continued to work. Cleveland’s managers have been a roaring success for the last 10 years. Once again, we can forget what happened when you do not have a good manager. Look at the years between the 2007 and 2016 teams. That was a great lesson and how not to win in baseball. As the old saying goes, a fish rots from the head down. If you have a manager who cannot win, your team will not win. This seems to be an issue that the guardians have solved.
Our offense has been Jose Ramirez and the seven dwarfs. Hopefully, that has changed. Bo Naylor has been on a hot streak. We need a hitter who can protect Ramirez from being walked at every at-bat. Ramirez gets pitched around every chance other teams can get. We need our hitters to hit enough so they have to pitch to Ramirez. We are lucky to have Ramirez. Most hitters of that talent are in Boston and New York, collecting millions and millions of dollars. Jose Ramirez took a hometown discount to stay. And that has been a key to the Guardians’ success. Let’s take advantage of Ramirez’s prime and win a World Series. This team has the talent to do it. Our hitters are just going to have to hit. We cannot jerk around and take at-bats off. The Indians have the prospect to make a big trade. But we do not want to trade off prospects if we don’t have to.
Lane Thomas is proving to be worth whatever we gave for him. This is a case of having a two-headed monster that rivals anything that the Dodgers or Yankees have. The talent level for our top two hitters are right up there with them. But talent level doesn’t do any good if you cannot unlock that talent. Jose Ramirez and Lane Thomas are going to have to carry our team. And they can do it. It would help a lot if we had more hitters like Bo Naylor go on a hot streak. That makes our offense top 10 in baseball. Combine that with our defense and our pitching staff and that is a World Series-winning formula.
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