CLEVELAND -- The sellout crowd at Progressive Field on Saturday was clad in red and full of juice, buzzing even before first pitch as playoff baseball returned to Northeast Ohio. A week’s worth of anticipation had built after the AL Central champion Guardians spent the week with a first-round bye in the postseason.
The Cleveland faithful showed up on Saturday. The Guardians’ offense did not.
The Guardians lost, 3-0, to the White Sox in Game 1 of the AL Division Series, while struggling to muster much of anything offensively. Against five Chicago pitchers, Cleveland tallied three hits and five walks, left seven runners on base and finished 0-for-3 with runners in scoring position.
“You want to win every game, but it's a five-game series for a reason,” catcher Austin Hedges said. “That stunk. We're a better team than that. But anytime we give up three runs, we usually expect to win.”
In all best-of-five postseason series, teams taking a 1-0 lead have gone on to win the series 116 of 160 times (73%). In Division Series with the current 2-2-1 format, teams taking a 1-0 lead on the road have gone on to win 35 of 48 times (also 73%).
In other words, Cleveland has work to do, and fast. It can’t afford another offensive showing like Saturday in this best-of-five series.
“We've just gotta flush it. I know I do for sure,” said Jo Adell, who went 0-for-4 with four strikeouts in his postseason debut. “Just [act] like it never happened and go out and compete and play the game we know how to play.”
“We've got to win three of the next four,” Hedges said.
The Guardians finished the regular season in the bottom third of MLB in several offensive categories, including runs per game (4.19, 24th) and team OPS (.696, 26th). However, their production was night and day over the final two months, certainly after the acquisitions of Adell and Nathaniel Lowe before the Trade Deadline.
From Aug. 3 on, Cleveland ranked eighth in runs (232) and tied for ninth in OPS (.731).
While Saturday looked more like the first four months of the season, the Guardians don't think the bye week was to blame. Cleveland held workouts with simulated game action at Progressive Field this week to balance rest with potential rust.
“Whether we'd been playing or hadn't been playing, it was nice to rest and practice and come into a good mindset,” said Lowe, who went 1-for-2 with a double and a walk after pinch-hitting for David Fry in the fourth inning. “But at the end of the day, we have to score, and today, we didn't.”
“We got to rest, recover. The pitchers were fresh,” Hedges added. “Hitters got to face pitchers live. We were in an extremely competitive environment, I think, the whole time. We got to play in front of our own home crowd [Saturday].
“I thought everything was ours for the taking, and we just didn't play our best ball today.”
Lowe felt the Guardians’ swing decisions weren’t great and that they lost count leverage as a result. Cleveland didn’t log a hit off White Sox opener Hagen Smith, who tossed 2 2/3 scoreless innings. He walked three to load the bases in the third, but lefty reliever Bryan Hudson got Chase DeLauter to line out to left field to end the threat.
Walks by Lowe and Hedges and a double by Travis Bazzana loaded the bases with two outs in the fourth. Brayan Rocchio lined out to right field off lefty Anthony Kay to end that threat, and Grant Taylor threw four scoreless innings to end the game.
Using the bye as an excuse for Saturday would also ring hollow because the Guardians are facing an opponent they know extremely well. Cleveland went 6-7 against Chicago this season, with 11 games decided by three or fewer runs.
Plus, the Guardians pitched well Saturday. Parker Messick’s lone blemish over 4 1/3 innings was a two-run homer to Munetaka Murakami. Chicago’s third run came via Colson Montgomery's cue-shot double down the third-base line. Kyle Teel scored after Angel Martínez’s throw home popped out of Hedges’ glove.
What needs to happen before Game 2? The adage is that momentum in baseball is the next day’s starting pitcher. The Guardians feel good about Gavin Williams taking the ball Monday.
And for a team that was tied with the White Sox for seventh in MLB in runs scored in September, the best elixir might be a short memory.
“We didn't sign up to win every single game of the playoffs,” Hedges said. “We signed up to win the World Series. So [we'll] get a good day off tomorrow and then back at it Monday, and we'll play better baseball.”