The Guardians Orchestrated An All-Time Collapse In The Top Of The 9th To Set Up A Walk-Off Home Run And Sweep The Twins
Here's where I'll start this blog, because it's the most ridiculous photo I've ever seen considering what happened next. But before we discuss perhaps the worst sequence of events in all of baseball this year, let's first take a step back and look at the play immediately before. The Guardians had taken their a2-1 lead to the 9th (in what was hyped up to be a very big May series against the Twins), when they trotted out the best closer in baseball, and will one day be the best closer in franchise history, Mr. Emmanuel Clase. He proceeded to strike out Correa to start, got Kepler to line out to short, and then hit the next batter. Fine, one runner on, two outs, and we get this grounder...
Why didn't we just throw to first? Either way, looks pretty clearly out if you ask me. Unfortunately, not only did the umpire disagree, so did the replay review. Insane. But fine, first and second, two outs, Clase gets to an 0-2 count....and we get a weak ground to Naylor at first. Flips it to Clase and BALL GAME! (Not). Not only do we miss the catch, we then inexplicably go from an easy rundown to end the game to gifting them a run. Truly an all-time awful play....
That was so back-breaking that I was convinced the Guardians were going to go from not one, but THREE chances to end the game and completely the monumental sweep of the Twins, to flat out losing. But we got out of it and went to the bottom of the 9th.
Got a baserunner, and it took ANOTHER missed call by the umpire that thank God the replay booth fixed this time, and then an intentional walk of Josh Naylor, for Will Brennan to come up and well, I'll let Tom Hamilton take it from here:
The best in the fucking business, hands down. And that's a 3 game SWEEP of the team that everyone said was hot on the Tribe's tail. 30 wins by May 19th for the team that had an Over/Under of 79.5 heading into the year. And now the question must be asked a month later: can I finally be excited about the Guardians YET? Give me the date, haters. Give me the date where I can finally get excited about this team, because I love them so fucking much.
….and Kwan is getting closer to returning.
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I just wanted this team to tread water until he returned, but they just keep fucking winning. I do think we need him back badly, but the results show we've won 6 of our last 7, swept the Twins, and are now just the 4th team in baseball to win 30 games. And after a little research project, I've determined that 7 of our next 8 series are against teams below .500, including five teams that are dead last in their division. Let's go win a bunch of fucking baseball games, boys.