ALDS Game 5 Tonight: Williams vs. Burke in Cleveland for the Last Ticket to the LCS

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2026

By the time you’re thinking about dinner tonight, October will have its final four. That’s what’s on the table in Cleveland: one game, nine innings (maybe more), and the last seat at the championship table. The White Sox and Guardians play Game 5 at 8:08 p.m. ET, and when it’s over we’ll know every team playing for a pennant. The Rays already know they’re in. The Dodgers and Brewers already know they’re dancing on Sunday. Tonight, Cleveland and Chicago find out who gets the last invitation.

Here’s your Saturday in October, all in one place.

AL Division Series · Game 5He closed Game 4 on Thursday. He starts Game 5 tonight.

Gavin Williams threw 18 pitches on Thursday night in Chicago — the final three outs of a 9-5 win, his first major league relief appearance, pressed into duty when All-Star closer Cade Smith got touched up in the ninth. Then he walked by Stephen Vogt’s office after the game and told his manager he wanted the ball on Saturday. So Vogt gave it to him. “Gavin wants the ball. We want him to have the ball, and it’s his game,” Vogt said Friday. “The game will tell us when it’s time to move on, or maybe he takes it the whole way. We don’t know. We gotta get there and find out.”

This is the same Gavin Williams who struck out 11 White Sox in Game 2 on Monday — the first pitcher in franchise history to whiff five straight batters in a postseason game, with 16 pitches at 100 mph or better. He led the American League with 248 strikeouts this season and cut his walks from a league-worst 83 a year ago to 61. Tonight will be his sixth start and seventh appearance against Chicago this season. Nobody in either clubhouse knows these hitters better.

Chicago counters with Sean Burke: 11-7 with a 3.34 ERA and 185 strikeouts, making just his second start of this postseason after helping win Game 2. Here’s the thing about the White Sox — manager Will Venable has basically managed the entire month out of the bullpen, and it’s worked. The problem is the bill comes due eventually. Chicago’s relievers have been tagged for nine runs in each of the last two losses. Cleveland’s side isn’t any fresher: the Guardians needed eight pitchers to survive Game 4 after Parker Messick walked four batters and got yanked in the third inning, and Vogt admitted the original script “got ripped up” before most fans found their seats.

So tonight is the simplest question in baseball: who has anything left? If Williams gives Cleveland real length — five, six innings of that 100-mph stuff — the Guardians’ path is clean. If he’s laboring early, it becomes a bullpen game, and the White Sox have been living in bullpen chaos all October. They’re comfortable there. (Full pitching preview here.)

What the winner getsMonday in Tampa — or the long winter

The Guardians were down 0-2 on Monday night in their own ballpark, and the obituaries were being drafted. Then they went to Chicago and won twice. Do it once more and they become just the eighth team since 1995 to climb out of an 0-2 hole in a best-of-five. And here’s the absurd part of this series: the road team has won all four games. Somebody has to break that trend tonight, because there’s no road team left.

For the White Sox, it’s the culmination of the most improbable turnaround in recent memory. Three straight 100-loss seasons. Then, per the Associated Press, something no team had ever done: follow consecutive 100-loss seasons with a playoff berth. They swept the Astros in the Wild Card round — their first playoff series win since the 2005 World Series — then took the first two in Cleveland behind Munetaka Murakami’s 440-foot Game 1 homer and a combined three-hitter. A win tonight sends them to their first ALCS since that 2005 championship run.

Cleveland’s bats finally showed up in Game 4: back-to-back homers in the fifth — Patrick Bailey pinch-hitting, then Ramírez crushing a two-run shot, the club’s first home runs of the entire series — followed by a six-run sixth in which ten Guardians came to the plate and eight straight reached. Travis Bazzana’s RBI double tied it; Bailey’s single put Cleveland ahead for good; Ramírez and Jo Adell piled on. The White Sox never led again. (How Game 4 unfolded.)

The winner gets on a plane to Tampa for ALCS Game 1 on Monday. The loser starts the offseason. The line says Guardians -139, White Sox +115, total 7 — the books think Cleveland, but barely, and they think runs will be hard to come by.

NL Championship SeriesThe aces are official: Skubal vs. Misiorowski on Sunday

While Cleveland and Chicago sort out the American League, the National League already knows its first two pitching matchups — and they’re the best of the entire postseason. Dodgers manager Dave Roberts confirmed Friday that Tarik Skubal gets Game 1 on Sunday at American Family Field, with Yoshinobu Yamamoto going in Game 2 on Monday. The Brewers will counter with Jacob Misiorowski and Logan Henderson. (Full NLCS preview here.)

Read that Game 1 matchup again: a two-time American League Cy Young winner against the heavy frontrunner for this year’s National League Cy Young. Skubal was dominant in his Dodgers postseason debut — six innings, one run, seven strikeouts against the Braves in triple-digit heat — and he’s 5-0 with a 1.95 ERA over his last five starts. Misiorowski went 16-5 with a major-league-best 1.80 ERA and 252 strikeouts across 174.2 innings, and in 17 career innings against the Dodgers he’s posted a 1.59 ERA with 27 strikeouts. “I think we’ve got the best rotation top to bottom in baseball,” Roberts said Friday. Milwaukee, with 103 wins and home field, would like a word.

This is the rematch the Brewers have been waiting a full year for. Last October the Dodgers swept them out of the NLCS — Milwaukee scored four runs in the entire series — and went on to win their second straight World Series. Now Los Angeles is chasing something no National League team has ever done: three straight titles. The Brewers went 4-3 against the Dodgers this season and aren’t carrying last year’s baggage. Two things to watch before first pitch Sunday: Miguel Rojas, who left NLDS Game 3 with lower back pain, took ground balls and batting practice Friday and the Dodgers will make a roster call in the morning; and Roberts acknowledged the club is discussing adding a pitcher for the best-of-seven, which would mean dropping a position player. Rosters are due Sunday morning.

The waiting gameThe Rays haven’t played since Wednesday. That’s the point.

There is exactly one team in baseball with nothing to do today, and it’s the one with the best record in the American League. The Rays swept the Yankees out on Wednesday — Victor Mesa Jr.’s two-run homer off Max Fried in the sixth was the 4-3 difference in the Bronx, sending New York to its second straight ALDS exit — and they’ve been resting ever since. The 98-win Rays get to watch tonight’s Game 5 like the rest of us, then host the survivor in ALCS Game 1 on Monday. (Rays ALCS preview here.)

That rest is the quiet subplot of tonight. Whoever survives Cleveland gets roughly 36 hours to fly to Tampa, exhale, and face a team whose bullpen hasn’t thrown a meaningful pitch in five days — while their own relievers just emptied the tank in a winner-take-all. Rest doesn’t win series by itself. But it sure doesn’t hurt.

One game tonight. Aces dueling on Sunday. The final four set by Monday. This is the best weekend of the baseball year — see it all on the MLB page.