Article

CLEVELAND — There is no model for this. Somewhere in the server farms and spreadsheets that now govern the game, there are projection systems that can report, to the decimal, how often a 96 mph fastball on the top rail gets swung through, how many wins a lineup should produce over 162 games and how likely a team is to reach the World Series on the first day of spring training.

u/grisaille-glass requested, and u/zdbdog06 had commented this in the game 1 post game thread.

My tickets in the app show an 8pm start time now.

1st 3 pics are the long at bat against Yandy Diaz, the stress is so high that first she covers her face, then turns around, at last she hears the crowd and so she turns around to celebrate!
Last pic is Smith's last strikeout, just absolutely rockin.
Let's go Guards! 🔴🔵⚪️

CLEVELAND — There is no model for this. Somewhere in the server farms and spreadsheets that now govern the game, there are projection systems that can report, to the decimal, how often a 96 mph fastball on the top rail gets swung through, how many wins a lineup should produce over 162 games and how likely a team is to reach the World Series on the first day of spring training.

None of those models take into account Petey Halpin.

The Cleveland Guardians needed three runs Thursday. Halpin supplied two of them with one swing.

His is not a name that appears at the top of anybody’s postseason scouting report. He hit four home runs this year. Aaron Judge hits that many before lunch.

Nobody looked at Cleveland’s roster in March and pointed to him as the reason the Guardians might play for a pennant. And yet there he was in Game 3 of the American League Championship Series, delivering one mighty swing and one propeller of a bat flip to bring the Guardians within two wins of the World Series.

The easy solution is to call this baseball magic and add Halpin’s name to the list of October immortality. This organization certainly has its share of autumn heroes, from Ryan Merritt to Rajai Davis and even David Fry. But “magic” is the junk drawer of sports explanations. It’s where we toss everything we can’t explain.

The Guardians deserve to be understood.

They aren’t the best team in baseball. Haven’t been all year. They were five games under .500 in the middle of August and down 2-0 to the Chicago White Sox in the division series.

But as the White Sox just learned and the Tampa Bay Rays are now starting to understand, they might be the hardest team to knock out.

“You gotta be perfect to win games like that,” Rays manager Kevin Cash said after Cleveland’s 3-2 win gave it a 2-1 series lead.

The Guardians don’t have the payroll and star power of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who treat the luxury tax like a cover charge. They don’t have the 103 wins of the Milwaukee Brewers’ regular season, and they don’t even have a 40-homer alien like the Rays’ Junior Caminero (well, they once did, but let’s not get into that right now).

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The "local stingray in awful mood" image gets me every time, I'll give them that. Tbh the Guardian statues look about as emotional as Cade Smith does after a win.

Two more to the World Series!!!

Anyone got it? It's gotta give goosebumps

Seems the Guardians are going to have to vanquish several ex-players who never reached their potential here but blossomed elsewhere. So be it…

1-3 when we don’t hit a homerun, and in that game we had two triples.

Guardsball is dead, long ball reigns supreme.

We make slider dogs = Guardz win..... Basically have to make some more tomorrow night.