The Guardians aren’t done yet, and Patrick Bailey is a big reason why.
Down 2-0 in the fifth inning of Game 4 of the American League Division Series on Thursday night in Chicago, Cleveland needed somebody - anybody - to crack things open. Stephen Vogt went to Bailey off the bench for Austin Hedges, and the catcher who has spent most of his value in the field delivered the kind of October swing nobody saw coming. On a 3-1 pitch from Erick Fedde, Bailey sent a ball into the right-field stands and suddenly the Guardians had life.
That blast flipped the mood in a hurry, and Cleveland kept rolling from there. Three batters later, José Ramírez hammered a two-run home run to give the Guardians their first lead of the night.
The White Sox answered with two runs of their own in the bottom of the inning, but Cleveland wasn’t done. Travis Bazzana tied it with an RBI double in the sixth, and then Bailey came right back to bite Chicago again.
Grant Taylor came in to face the 27-year-old catcher, and Bailey jumped on the third pitch he saw, lining a curveball into left field. Bazzana scored, Cleveland moved ahead for good, and the floodgates opened. The Guardians tacked on four more runs in the inning and never looked back, taking a 9-5 win and sending the series back to Cleveland.
Bailey’s surge is what makes this run feel so strange. He won back-to-back Gold Gloves with the Giants in 2024 and ‘25, but San Francisco dealt him to Cleveland on May 9 after his bat lagged far behind his glove.
Before the trade, he was hitting .146/.213/.183 with one home run and five RBIs in 30 games. Even after the move, his offense never fully caught up.
He finished the regular season at .206 with a .607 OPS, 10 home runs and a 71 wRC+ in 112 games.
That’s not the profile of a player who usually turns into a postseason difference-maker. Yet over the last two games in Chicago, Bailey has done exactly that.
In Game 3, he went 2-for-4 with a walk and a run scored. That performance was enough for Vogt to give him the nod over Hedges in the fifth inning Thursday, and Bailey rewarded that decision by going 2-for-3 with a homer and the go-ahead RBI single.
His hot stretch has come as part of a broader Cleveland turnaround at the plate. The Guardians’ offense spent most of the year near the bottom of the league in several categories, but it has suddenly come alive in this series. After scoring just three total runs in the first two games, Cleveland put up 18 across Games 3 and 4 and collected 21 hits over its last 18 innings.
Now the Guardians head home with a chance to finish the comeback and reach the ALCS. The White Sox, meanwhile, are trying to avoid becoming the first team to cough up a 2-0 lead in a division series since Cleveland did it to the Yankees in the 2017 ALDS.
Somehow, the player nobody expected to carry the offense has become one of the central figures in the series.
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White Sox Enter Crucial Game 4 With One Big Decision Looming
The White Sox are back home for Game 4 of the American League Division Series, with Cleveland still looking for its first homer of the series and Jos Ramrez looming as the most obvious threat to change that. Chicagos pitching plan has not been announced, which makes this feel like one of those October games where the manager is forced to keep a few options open and read the matchup pitch by pitch.
Munetaka Murakami enters the night as the favorite to leave the yard, helped by the kind of postseason power that can tilt a game in a hurry. For the White Sox, the bigger question may be less about who starts and more about how quickly they can match Clevelands urgency if the Guardians finally start driving the ball with authority. [Read more 🡒]
White Sox Suddenly Have A Big-Inning Problem At The Worst Time
The White Sox had the kind of night that can flip a Division Series in an instant, building leads of 2-0 and 4-3 before watching the game slip away against the Guardians. Early pitching trouble from Hagen Smith and Jordan Hicks put pressure on Chicago right away, and even after the offense did enough to keep the game close, the pitching staff could not hold the line long enough to protect the advantage.
The pivotal stretch came in the sixth, when Cleveland pushed across multiple runs against Anthony Kay and Grant Taylor and turned a one-run game into a much steeper climb for Chicago. A late White Sox push kept things from getting completely out of hand, but the comeback effort never quite got there, leaving the club to regroup as the series shifts to Cleveland. [Read more 🡒]
White Sox Let A Closeout Game Turn Into A Brutal Reset
A chance to take a commanding step in the American League Division Series slipped away as the White Sox were beaten 9-3 by the Guardians in Game 3, trimming Chicagos series lead to 2-1. What had looked like a closeout opportunity instead turned into a night in which Clevelands pitching dictated the pace, piling up 19 strikeouts in nine innings and setting a major league postseason record in the process.
Chicago also had to watch Clevelands lineup come alive at key moments, with Jos Ramrez collecting two hits that included a two-run triple. Jo Adell added to the damage with a bases-clearing triple, turning what had been a tight postseason game into a stern reset for a White Sox club that now has a shorter runway than it did before first pitch. [Read more 🡒]