With “Bunts, Bombs and Chaos,” the Guardians do a series with the Yankees

CLEVELAND – Luke Weaver, the bright, sharp and everyday closer for the New York Yankees, had a helpful reminder Thursday night when asked how he felt about a road trip and a three-nil lead in the American League Championship Series would recover.

“Honestly, just a pitch away,” Weaver said, explaining that he hit a double play in the bottom of the ninth and gave the next batter two quick strikes. “I just have to execute. I really feel like I let the team down there.”

Weaver moved well out of the zone on his next three throws before Lane Thomas hit a double off the left field wall. Jhonkensy Noel followed with his seismic home run that gave the Yankees the lead and pushed them from the brink of a pennant into a real, competitive ALCS with the Cleveland Guardians.

If the Guardians’ 7-5 win leads them to a pennant, David Fry’s two-run blast off Clay Holmes in the 10th inning will go down as one of the greatest moments in franchise history. But it shouldn’t faze the Yankees. If so, they wouldn’t have earned the World Series berth that has eluded them for 15 years.

What happened Thursday was baseball at its finest, with superstars and backup players taking turns playing heroes. Baseball players know when they are part of something special. There’s a difference between messing up a game and just getting beaten.

“Two good teams are headed there,” said Aaron Judge, whose laser-beam home run off Emmanuel Clase tied the game in the eighth and set up Giancarlo Stanton’s go-ahead run. “Just great shot after great shot.”

Yankees manager Aaron Boone, a third-generation baseball player with a strong sense of history, called it a classic.

“It’s an amazing game to witness,” Boone said. “It was playoff baseball. Both teams kept coming up with haymakers and big offenses, big moments from two really good bullpens. They survived us tonight. They had one more good shot than us.”

Fry’s final swing robbed the Yankees of an easy path to the World Series. But they were never entitled to that anyway. Sure, they spend $200 million more on payroll than Cleveland. It gave them two more regular season wins.

“You don’t really think about beating a team,” Weaver said. “I mean, 4 and 0, that’s a very, very difficult thing. We see these games go back and forth all the time. I don’t want to say it’s a surprise because they won’t let us win and we definitely want to win it.”

He added: “It was a big win for them but it shouldn’t devastate us in any way. It should just be like that, you do your best, just keep going and give credit where it’s due.”

Exactly. The Guardians could have – and perhaps should have – won Game 2 when so much was going for them but they still couldn’t manage to win the series. Now they have recovered from the brink. At least one of the Yankees has seen it here before.

“I was standing right on that field, I think in the eighth inning, when they tied the game with a big home run,” said first baseman Anthony Rizzo, the former Cub who watched helplessly as Rajai Davis happily frolicked around the bases in the field 2016 World Series Finals.

“Luckily it wasn’t Game 7. So that’s a series. They are a really good team and we know that. Tomorrow we will bounce back and be ready to win.”

The Cubs had one inning – and a miraculous rain delay – to rally after Davis’ game-winning hit and take the title from Cleveland. The Yankees still have the series lead, with two more games here and two more in the Bronx if necessary.

And history is full of examples of teams that won the first two games of a best-of-seven at home, lost Game 3 on a walk-off hit, and then came back to win. It’s been a fairly regular phenomenon over the last few decades of the World Series:

1980 Phillies: Tackled Kansas City’s Willie Aikens in Game 3 to win the World Series in six games.

1988 Dodgers: Tackled Oakland’s Mark McGwire in Game 3 to win the World Series in five games.

1991 Gemini: Was defeated by Atlanta’s Mark Lemke in Game 3 and won the World Series in seven games.

1995 Braves: In Game 3, Cleveland’s Eddie Murray was sent off and won the World Series in six games.

Red Sox 2018: Beat Max Muncy of the Dodgers in Game 3 and won the World Series in five games.

The reason for this – if there is any reason other than the wonderful randomness of baseball – seems to be part physical, part psychological. The team with the 2-0 lead is usually better. But the team, which returns home with a 0-2 hole, will be buoyed by the home fans and the tense circumstances. If the better team prevails in the end, Game 3 will be a pure dead cat bounce.

Then again, there’s so much postseason history that fans of both teams can almost always find something to help them sleep. It could be a very good omen for Cleveland to beat the Yankees with a postseason home run. Consider this from James Smyth, researcher extraordinaire for the YES Network:

Postseason walk-off HR against Yankees
1957 WS Gm 4 with MLN Eddie Mathews
1960 WS Gm 7 with PIT Bill Mazeroski
2003 WS Gm 4 at FLA Alex Gonzalez
2004 ALCS Gm 4 at BOS David Ortiz
2019 ALCS Gm 2 at HOU Carlos Correa
2019 ALCS Gm 6 at HOU Jose Altuve
2024 ALCS Gm 3 at CLE David Fry

— James Smyth (@JamesSmyth621) October 18, 2024

As every Yankees fan knows, all of these series ended in defeat. To keep this streak going, the Guardians will have to stick to their formula, which finally emerged on Thursday.

Eight pitchers together for mostly excellent work. Second baseman Andrés Giménez and first baseman Josh Naylor provided a key highlight in the tenth. The Guardians stole three bases and all four bench players had hits: Fry, Noel, Will Brennan and Bo Naylor.

“Bunts, bombs and mayhem,” Fry said. “We talked about that. It felt like we got back to it tonight.”

The Yankees still have the edge, not just in games but also in depth. The Guardians, who were already struggling to get a rotation going, will rely on Gavin Williams (3-10, 4.86) in Game 4 and perhaps Ben Lively, who wasn’t available until Alex Cobb’s back injury, in Game 5 The squad’s bullpen has looked lethal, with a 3.80 ERA this postseason.

But they made it a series, and a truly memorable one at that, if Thursday’s chaos puts them on the road to the World Series. The Yankees should know better than to dwell on it.

“A loss is a loss, whether it’s clean and we lost 3-1 or something,” Stanton said. “This one obviously hurts a little more, but at the end of the day an L is an L – by 1, 2, 8, whatever. Tomorrow is a new day. We have to do it.”

It might be difficult to do it. For a while, it seemed so easy for the Yankees. Now it’s not like that anymore. Welcome to October.

(Photo by Jhonkensy Noel: Nick Cammett / Getty Images)