ALCS Game 5 Preview: Rasmussen vs. Messick With the Series Tied 2-2 and a Trip Back to St. Petersburg on the Line

CLEVELAND

There is no travel day, no breath, and no margin left in this American League Championship Series. The Tampa Bay Rays and the Cleveland Guardians play Game 5 on Sunday afternoon at Progressive Field — first pitch 5:08 p.m. ET on TBS and HBO Max, with the game also listed on TBS/truTV — with the best-of-seven series tied 2-2 and the winner taking a 3-2 lead back to St. Petersburg for Game 6 on Monday. Drew Rasmussen starts for Tampa Bay. Rookie Parker Messick starts for Cleveland. Somebody flies south tonight one win from the World Series, and somebody flies south with their season on the line.

That is the shape of a swing game, and both managers know it. Rays manager Kevin Cash said as much after his club evened the series on Saturday night. “It means a lot because we know that we play well at home in front of our fans,” Cash said, according to the Associated Press. “We've got a huge game, another swing game tomorrow.” The guarantee Tampa Bay bought itself on Saturday — at least one more home game, in front of those fans — is real. But the Rays did not fly to Cleveland to settle for a guarantee. They came to take the lead with them.

How Saturday flipped the series

Game 4 was the night Tampa Bay's bats finally showed up. The Rays won 7-3 on a raw, 46-degree night at Progressive Field to even the series, and they did it with the top of an order that had spent three games as a rumor. Tampa Bay's first four hitters — Yandy Díaz, Jonathan Aranda, Chandler Simpson and Junior Caminero — combined for six of the Rays' 11 hits and six RBIs. In the first three games of the series, that same group had gone 7-for-41 with three RBIs.

Aranda was the headliner. After going 0-for-10 across the first three games, he collected three hits and two RBIs, and his single in the seventh inning turned into the game's breaking play: the ball got by Cleveland right fielder Chase DeLauter, two runs scored, and a tight game cracked open. Díaz finished the job in the ninth, driving a two-run homer off Matt Festa. In between, Nick Martinez gave the Rays exactly what they needed — 5 1/3 innings of one-run ball — to earn his first postseason win in 10 career postseason outings, a stat line that says something about how long and how strangely Martinez has been waiting for a night like that.

Cleveland had its moments. Travis Bazzana hit his first postseason home run, the kind of swing a rookie remembers forever — but Bazzana also made a fielding error, the kind of play a rookie replays in his sleep, and the Guardians' night kept tilting between those two poles. And hanging over all of it is the schedule: Friday's rain postponement erased the travel off-day entirely. Both teams played Saturday night, both play Sunday, and both get on a plane for Florida afterward. There is no reset button left in this series. Our full account of Saturday's 7-3 Game 4 win has the inning-by-inning story.

Rasmussen vs. Messick: the matchup

On paper, the experience edge is not close. Rasmussen, Tampa Bay's right-hander, has been superb this October: 1-0 with a 1.29 ERA and 17 strikeouts in 14 innings across two postseason starts, on the back of a regular season in which he went 16-5 with a 2.67 ERA and 174 strikeouts in 172 innings, according to the Akron Beacon Journal and MLB.com. He started Game 1 of this series and was solid in defeat — six innings, two earned runs, eight hits, no walks, seven strikeouts in a 7-3 Guardians win. Cleveland has seen his best sequencing once already. The question for Game 5 is whether familiarity helps the hitters or the pitcher who struck out seven of them without walking one.

Messick's story is almost the mirror image. The Guardians' rookie left-hander owns a 3.09 ERA this postseason with 14 strikeouts in 11 2/3 innings across three starts — but an 0-2 record that does not begin to describe how he has pitched. His regular season was excellent — 12-9, a 2.56 ERA, 193 strikeouts in 186 1/3 innings — and in Game 2 of this series he allowed three runs over five innings with none of them earned, undone by a José Ramírez error in a 3-1 Rays win. Messick has now started two games in this postseason in which the defense and the run support conspired against him. A rookie making a swing-game start in October, with a 46-degree crowd still thawing out from Saturday, is either a burden or the opportunity of a lifetime. Sunday will tell us which.

What the winner actually wins

The arithmetic is simple and the stakes are not. Win Sunday, and you need one win in two home-or-away games in St. Petersburg to take the pennant. Lose Sunday, and you need to win two straight, starting Monday night, with no day off to line anything up. Because Friday's rainout compressed the calendar, bullpen fatigue is now a series within the series: whichever pitching staff Cash and Cleveland's staff have left standing after five games in this compressed stretch will decide what Game 6 looks like before a single pitch is thrown.

There is also a waiting room at the end of this. The National League side of the bracket is already settled: the Milwaukee Brewers swept the Los Angeles Dodgers and are sitting at home awaiting the American League winner, with Game 1 of the World Series set for Friday, October 23, in Milwaukee, as reported in Sunday morning's sports roundups. Every extra game this ALCS needs is a day of rest Milwaukee gets and the AL champion does not. Our look at the Brewers' long week of waiting covers that side of the bracket.

One last scene-setter, and it cuts both ways: getting into Progressive Field on Sunday got cheaper as the week went on. USA Today reported that Game 5 ticket prices had dropped nearly 40 percent since Thursday, with seats starting around $200 — a remarkable number for a swing game in a championship series, and perhaps a side effect of a rain-shuffled schedule and a cold weekend forecast. Whoever is in those seats will watch the game that decides who controls this series. First pitch is 5:08 p.m. ET. Follow the rest of October in our sports coverage.