Guardians Complete 0-2 Comeback, Blank White Sox 2-0 in Game 5 to Reach ALCS

CLEVELAND

Twenty-one strikeouts. Three hits. One swing. The Guardians are going back to the American League Championship Series — and it only took one of the most improbable comebacks in postseason history to get there. Cleveland blanked the Chicago White Sox 2-0 in a winner-take-all Game 5 of the AL Division Series on Saturday night, completing the climb out of an 0-2 hole that almost nobody gets out of. José Ramírez did the scoring. Gavin Williams did nearly everything else.

One game on the October slate. It was the only one that mattered. Here’s how it went.

AL Division Series · Game 5The gem: Williams carves up the Sox for a dozen punchouts

Five days ago Gavin Williams was closing out Game 4 in his first career relief appearance, throwing three outs and boarding a plane back to Cleveland. On Saturday night he gave the Guardians everything they asked for and then some: 5⅔ shutout innings, one hit, two walks — and 12 strikeouts, tying the franchise single-game postseason record set by Charles Nagy in the 1996 ALDS.

Williams carried a no-hitter into the sixth before Kyle Teel laced a two-out single. He hit Colson Montgomery to open the frame and walked Miguel Vargas after Teel’s hit, and that was the end — Erik Sabrowski came on and struck out Munetaka Murakami to kill the only real White Sox threat of the night. Sabrowski, Hunter Gaddis and Cade Smith covered the final 10 outs, striking out nine of them. The combined 21 strikeouts are the most ever in a nine-inning postseason game — breaking the record of 19 that the White Sox themselves had set in their Game 3 loss on Wednesday.

Williams’ line for the series is absurd: 24 strikeouts over three appearances, one shy of the Division Series record set by Gerrit Cole in 2019. And this is a bullpen conversation, too — on Friday the Guardians’ relief corps was supposedly running on fumes after burning eight pitchers in the Game 4 slugfest. Turns out fumes are all you need when the starter strikes out 12.

The swingRamírez golfs the lowest pitch of his life

Sean Burke gave Chicago everything it could have asked for: two runs on four hits over his start, and he left with his team still swinging at ghosts. The damage came in the fourth, when Steven Kwan led off with the game’s first hit and Ramírez came up with a runner on. Burke threw him a 78-mph knuckle curve that Statcast measured 8.88 inches off the ground — a pitch no human being is supposed to do anything with, and the lowest pitch ever golfed for a postseason home run since pitch tracking began in 2008. Ramírez scooped it 348 feet over the right-field wall, inside the foul pole, and that was the ballgame.

It was Ramírez’s seventh RBI in the final three games of the series — the superstar stretch the Guardians needed from their superstar, all of it with elimination staring them down. Williams said it plain afterward: “Jose is Jose, we all love him. He always has that one moment all the time.” Burke could only shake his head: “Obviously, it came down to one pitch to Ramirez. He’s a really good player. He’s probably going to be in the Hall of Fame someday. But it’s frustrating.”

The comeback0-2 at home to champagne in the clubhouse

Take a second and appreciate what the Guardians just did. They are the 11th team in MLB history — and the first since 2017 — to win a best-of-five series after dropping the first two games. Even rarer: only the fourth to pull it off after losing the first two at home. They were done. The obituaries were being drafted on Monday night in their own ballpark. Then they won twice in Chicago — 9-3, 9-5 — and closed it out Saturday in front of 36,889 at Progressive Field.

For the White Sox, the what-ifs will sting for a long time. This is a team that came into the season with a zero percent chance of making the playoffs, that shocked the world just by getting here — and then held a 2-0 series lead, plus leads in both games in Chicago, and couldn’t close any of it out. Their 75 strikeouts across the five games set a best-of-five series record. “We came into the year with a zero percent chance in making the playoffs and we shocked the world and did everything we said we were going to do,” Colson Montgomery said after the loss. “Coming up short like this, it hurt. It hurts a lot. But there’s a lot to be proud of.”

What’s nextOctober gets down to four

The Guardians’ reward for the comeback: a plane to Florida. Cleveland opens the ALCS against the Tampa Bay Rays on Monday, and the Rays will be the fresher team by a mile — they’ve been resting since sweeping the Yankees on Wednesday while Cleveland has played elimination baseball for a week. Guardians manager Stephen Vogt framed it as only Cleveland could: “This was a difficult year, and for us to be one step away from the World Series, our ultimate goal, this is really exciting.” It’s Cleveland’s second ALCS trip in three years — the World Series drought, the longest in baseball, now sits at 78 years and counting.

And the other bracket is already cooking: the Dodgers-Brewers NLCS gets underway Sunday in Milwaukee, the two-time defending champs against the best record in baseball. Four teams left. The pennants start now. See everything on the MLB page.