ST. PETERSBURG, Fla.
For five innings on Monday night, Game 1 of the American League Championship Series belonged exactly to the team that was supposed to own it. The Tampa Bay Rays, the American League’s top seed and owners of a perfect postseason, scored twice in the first inning and handed the lead to Drew Rasmussen, who had taken a no-hitter into the eighth inning of his last home start. Then the Cleveland Guardians did what they have done all October: they waited, they fouled off the night’s script, and they scored in the sixth, the seventh, the eighth and the ninth to win 7-3 and take the opener of the best-of-seven series.
It is Cleveland’s fourth straight win, and the pattern is now impossible to ignore. The Guardians fell behind 0-2 in their Division Series against the Chicago White Sox and won three straight to advance. On Monday they fell behind 0-2 in the game’s first inning, on the road, against an ace dealing shutout baseball — and won going away, piling up 14 hits against a Rays team that had not lost since September 27.
The Rays Struck First, and Rasmussen Cruised
Tampa Bay’s first inning was a clinic in pressure. Yandy Díaz doubled to lead off against Cleveland starter Foster Griffin, moved up on a sacrifice and scored on Junior Caminero’s single. Caminero then came around on Jonny DeLuca’s two-out single to center, and the Rays had four hits and a 2-0 lead before Cleveland’s lineup had taken a swing in anger. Cedric Mullins would add a solo home run later, but the early damage was the kind Tampa Bay has ridden all month: manufacture two, then let the pitching strangle the game.
For a while, Rasmussen obliged. He carried the shutout into the sixth with the same form that produced his Division Series masterpiece against the Yankees, and Cleveland’s hitters spent the first half of the night looking for a pitch they could actually drive. The Guardians’ answer, when it came, arrived one loud swing at a time.
Two Homers Erased Five Innings of Work
Rookie Chase DeLauter led off the sixth by depositing a first-pitch fastball over the wall in left-center — his first postseason home run — to halve the lead. An inning later, Patrick Bailey led off the seventh with a towering drive to center, estimated at 436 feet, to tie the game 2-2 and end Rasmussen’s night. Two leadoff homers, two innings, and a game the Rays had controlled for two hours was suddenly even, with Cleveland’s deeper bullpen warming and Tampa Bay’s starter in the dugout.
That trade favors the Guardians every time. Five Cleveland relievers combined for five innings of one-run, two-hit relief, with Hunter Gaddis earning the win and Cade Smith — who pitched in all five games of the Division Series — throwing a perfect ninth once the lead was safe. Cleveland’s bullpen is not a bridge to a closer; at this point in October it is the team’s defining weapon.
Lowe Broke It Open Against His Old Team
The eighth inning turned on the smallest play of the night. José Ramírez led off with an infield single off Tyler Wells, a soft grounder that he simply outran. DeLauter followed with a double to right for his third hit of the game. After a groundout, left-hander Ian Seymour came in to face Nathaniel Lowe — who was drafted by Tampa Bay and spent his first two big-league seasons with the Rays — and Lowe lined an 0-2 pitch back up the middle. Ramírez and DeLauter both scored, and Cleveland led 4-2.
Mullins’ solo homer in the bottom of the eighth pulled Tampa Bay within a run and briefly revived the building, but the ninth removed all doubt. Ramírez singled home Angel Martínez with two outs for his fourth straight postseason game with an RBI, tying a franchise streak held by Sandy Alomar Jr. and Jim Thome, and Jo Adell followed with a two-run double that scored Ramírez and DeLauter for the final 7-3 margin. Ramírez, who told TNT Sports afterward through an interpreter that Cleveland is everything to him, finished with three hits. So did DeLauter, the rookie who started the comeback.
What It Means, and What Comes Next
For Tampa Bay, the loss is a first crack in an otherwise spotless October: the Rays swept the Yankees, had not trailed in that series, and had not lost a game in more than two weeks. Manager Kevin Cash said afterward that his group would respond on Tuesday, and the structure of the series still favors them — six of the remaining games’ geography starts with Game 2 at home. But home field only matters if you hold it, and Cleveland has now won three straight road games in this postseason while scoring 25 runs in them.
Game 2 is Tuesday night at Tropicana Field, with rookie left-hander Parker Messick starting for Cleveland and right-hander Freddy Peralta for the Rays. Tampa Bay needs its bats to give Peralta a lead worth protecting and its bullpen to find outs against a Cleveland order that, right now, treats the late innings as its personal property. The Guardians, meanwhile, are playing the most dangerous kind of October baseball there is: the kind where a two-run deficit in the sixth inning feels less like trouble than like an appointment.
More baseball and the rest of the night’s stories are on our Sports front and the Previously news front.
