Cleveland Guardians Fall Short: What Went Wrong in Wild Card Exit

In a series where everything needed to go right for the Cleveland Guardians, everything seemed to go wrong. It’s hard to blame it on any one thing, honestly, but the series came down to defensive miscues and poor situational hitting.

However, it’s not entirely fair to blame it on just those two things. Our two partners in crime, Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz, bear a significant amount of blame today. Hunter Gaddis has no business pitching in three straight playoff games, and if you have Clase, he probably doesn’t, or at the very least, you would have gone to Cade Smith when Erik Sabrowski got into trouble.

In Game Three of the playoffs, you expected Ortiz to be on the bump. He’s a heavy strikeout pitcher, and you’d have more faith in him to go deeper into his start, instead of 2+ innings from Slade Cecconi.

It’s also hard not to put some blame on the ownership. This is a bad roster. You have zero right-handed hitters you could trust, and continually putting out a bottom-five payroll in the sport is unfair to everyone in this organization. It’s organizational malpractice to never have real protection around Jose Ramirez since trading away Francisco Lindor.

For the more controllable metrics, the defense was a joke for three straight games. Detroit's first run was somehow ruled a double, but that’s a play CJ Kayfus needed to make to keep the run from scoring. That was one of a million different plays that needed to be made in this series. Even going back to Game One, scoring only once isn’t enough to win a game, but without the errors you committed, the series would have ended in a sweep.

For a team that relies on “Guards Ball,” it was Detroit that did all the little things throughout this series. Detroit played a clean series defensively, relied on small ball to move the runners, and they hustled out multiple bases, whereas the Guards ran into outs on the base paths.

2026 will be Paul Dolan’s final season as the majority owner of the team, so I doubt they add any contracts in the offseason with David Blitzer waiting to take over as the owner. It’s just disappointing to know that even a small cash infusion would put this team in actual competitor status.

On a brighter note, the starting rotation is in the best spot it’s been in years, the young bats showed they could compete under the bright October lights, and you still have Jose Ramirez. There’s always next year.