A Guardian shortstop trying to will a 10th-inning double play before he had full control of the ball. A Yankee right-fielder already in line for one of the biggest paydays in baseball history willing to wait for the fastball an off-speed-throwing Guardian reliever proved only too willing to provide.
Brayan Rocchio lost the handle on the toss leaving two Yankees aboard instead of side retired. Guards reliever Hunter Gaddis struck Gleyber Torres out, but wrestled Juan Soto through six off-speed breakers and a 1-2 count before someone, who knows whom, thought Gaddis could sneak a fastball past Soto, if not lure him into an inning-ending out.
Good luck with that. Showing precisely why he's in line for a mid-to-high nine-figure payday this winter to come, Soto got the fastball for which he probably prayed hard. Then, he launched it into the right center field seats with the Yankees' fortieth American League pennant attached.
With one swing Cleveland's Progressive Field went from extra-innings thrill to funeral parlour. If that was the ballpark mood, imagine the Guardians' clubhouse mood when the game ended, the Yankees had a 5-2 ticket to the World Series in their pockets, and the Guardians could only think about how far they'd come in how little time only to feel the big wrench of having not quite enough.
"Because we were so close," said left fielder Steven Kwan, referring to those in the Guards' uniform, not necessarily the now-finished American League Championship Series, "it makes it sting a little bit more."
For the Guardians and their respected rookie manager Stephen Vogt, it was the worst possible ending to an ALCS in which they'd made a better than decent showing — none of the five games was decided by a margin larger than 2 runs — but lacked the kind of putaway potency with which the Yankees seemed overendowed. On both sides of the ball.
Consider: Twice, in Games 4 and 5, Vogt had the opportunity to keep Giancarlo Stanton from making mischief. He could have walked Stanton instead of pitching to him. He pitched to him. Stanton made him pay with interest.
Especially in Game 5, when Guardians starting pitcher Tanner Bibee kept Stanton in check in the sixth inning with nothing but pitches off the zone, but not yet dispatched. That was the moment someone should have told Bibee one of two things: 1) Walk him, be done with it, then get rid of Jazz Chisholm, Jr., a far more feeble plate presence. 2) If you must pitch to Stanton, keep the damn ball off the zone.
Bibee tried. The slider aiming for the lower corner ended up hanging up under the middle. Stanton sent it hanging over the left center field fence. Tie game at two each.
Soto slammed home the pennant-clinching exclamation point (did anyone really doubt after that blast that the Guards would go quietly into that not-so-good gray night in the bottom of the 10th?), but there are reasons Stanton ended up as the ALCS Most Valuable Player award winner. In a word, he made it impossible for the Guards to contain him. Still.
This series: Four hits, every last one of them clearing the fences. Eight hits lifetime against the Guardians in the postseason, every last one of them bombs. Three set-clinching wins against the Guards (2020, 2022, Saturday night), and Stanton has dialed the Delta Quadrant in each one of them.
That was the last thing the Guardians needed in a set during which their biggest bopper, third baseman José (The Most Underrated Player in the League) Ramírez, was practically the invisible man. Oh, he had two doubles and a homer in the series, scored a pair, sent three home, but on a Saturday night when the Guards needed every man to patch the sinking ship Ramírez went 0-for-4 with an intentional walk.
Ramírez wasn't the number one Guard culprit, though. Their closer Emmanuel Clase recovered his regular season form too little, too late to make a big difference. Rocchio was a little too tentative at shortstop. The rest of the Guardian bullpen seemed gassed by the middle of Game 4.
None seemed more so than Cade Smith — who had the dubious honour of not being told to walk Stanton to set up a likely double play in the Game 4 sixth, and being allowed instead to serve Stanton a rising fastball that didn't rise enough for Stanton to miss planting it out of sight.
Those late home runs from Jhonkensy Noel and David Fry in Game 3 sure seemed like last year's news suddenly. And that Guardian bullpen dominance during the season sure seemed like a figment of somebody's warped imagination now.
Clase and Smith didn't surrender three homers all season — but they got ripped for three in this set. Gaddis couldn't be touched with anything including subpoenas all season — but there he was on the wrong end of Soto's proved-to-be-pennant-winning detonation.
The team called it, invariably, a season of growth. The Guardians did indeed grow into themselves this year, even if they now face of winter during which they may have to think of a tune-up or three. They own a generally weak AL Central division, but they can't afford to perform a hot stove league disappearing act.
That they got here at all despite losing their ace starter Shane Bieber for the season to Tommy John surgery tells you something about their resilience and their will. Not to mention losing Triston McKenzie to so much struggling after his 2022 breakout that he was disappeared into the minors. Not to mention Logan Allen lost likewise. Alex Cobb and Matthew Boyd weren't quite enough to make up for that.
So Vogt had to over-rely on his stellar bullpen. On the regular season they were bank. In the postseason their exhaustion collapsed them slowly, but surely. To the point where there's speculation now that Clase might be considered tradeable for some rotation reinforcement. Might.
The Guards needed more against these Yankees and simply couldn't find or keep it. In Game 5, they needed more than the brothers Naylor collaborating on a run in the second and Kwan singling Andres Gimenez home in the fifth. A 2-0 lead with elimination on the line isn't enough against these Yankees.
Not that the Yankees took them for granted. Just ask their oft-criticized general manager, who's had his job so long some Yankee fans might actually believe he was the guy who first hired Miller Huggins away from the Cardinals to manage them.
"I remember just going, 'Oh my God'," said Brian Cashman when Soto dropped the big bomb. "Did the prayer sign. And then knew that we had to somehow put them down in the bottom of the inning, because these guys don't go easy." Not even when Lane Thomas hit into the final out of the set, a long fly ball . . . to Soto himself in right field.
All that without Aaron Judge swinging one of the big Yankee bats. He managed to hit a pair out this ALCS, but the Leaning Tower of 161st Street was otherwise one of the sleepiest Yankees at the plate. (5-for-31; 13 strikeouts; 2 double plays.) His awakening in the World Series would be anything but welcome in the opposing dugout.
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