Gavin Williams didn’t just show up for Game 5. He took over the night.
With Cleveland’s season hanging by a thread, the Guardians right-hander carved through a White Sox lineup that had already seen plenty of him and turned in one of the best postseason outings a starter has ever put together for the franchise. Williams struck out 12 over 5 2/3 innings Saturday in the American League Division Series finale, tying Charles Nagy’s club postseason record for strikeouts by a starter.
That mark had stood since Game 4 of the 1996 ALDS against Baltimore. Williams matched it on a night when everything was stacked against comfort: the pressure, the workload, the short turnaround, the opponent, the stakes.
He allowed just one hit before leaving with the bases loaded in the sixth. Then Erik Sabrowski came in and punched out Munetaka Murakami to keep Cleveland in front, 2-0, and set off a roar inside a sold-out Progressive Field.
What made it even more striking was how quickly Williams had been asked to pivot. Just 48 hours earlier in Chicago, he had been pulled from the bullpen to close out Game 4 after Cade Smith got into trouble in the ninth. Williams needed only 18 pitches to finish off Cleveland’s 9-5 win and keep the Guardians alive.
By the next day, Stephen Vogt had already settled on his Game 5 starter.
“Gavin wants the ball,” Vogt said Friday. “We want him to have the ball, and it’s his game.”
Williams had said plenty too.
“I know after the game last night, I was walking by his office and I told him I was ready to go,” Williams said. “Whatever to help the team win, that’s what I’m going to do. Doesn’t matter the role at this point.”
On Saturday, he backed that up with force.
The right-hander leaned on the same mix that helped him lead the American League with 248 strikeouts during the regular season, using his fastball and breaking stuff to keep Chicago off balance all night. He had already fanned 11 White Sox hitters in Game 2 on Monday, becoming just the third different Cleveland pitcher to reach double digits in a postseason game. This time, he went one better and joined an even smaller club.
The only other Cleveland pitcher with multiple double-digit strikeout games in the postseason is Bartolo Colon, who did it in 1999 and 2001. Williams now owns two of the five such performances in franchise history, and both came in the same division series.
That’s what made the outing even louder: he did it against a Chicago offense that led the American League with 776 runs during the regular season.
Vogt had said before the game that Williams needed to stay aggressive and avoid getting trapped behind in counts.
“When he’s running that sinker to both sides, when he’s throwing the four-seams at the top and the spin pitch is over the plate,” Vogt said. “Gavin has got five pitches to do that.”
For most of the night, that plan worked exactly the way Cleveland hoped. Williams kept the White Sox from settling in until the sixth inning, when the bases filled up and Vogt had to make the move he knew might come.
He had already said Williams’ workload would be watched carefully after the Game 4 relief appearance, though he wasn’t setting a hard cutoff before first pitch.
“The game will tell us when it’s time to move on, or maybe he takes it the whole way,” Vogt said.
Williams, for his part, wasn’t interested in treating the situation like anything other than another assignment. He said before the game he couldn’t remember a time in his professional career when he had pitched in relief and then started again two days later. He also wasn’t leaning on fatigue as a shield.
“You just gotta think of it as another game,” Williams said. “Can’t really think of it as win and go home type game. Everybody has a job, and they know their job, and you just gotta execute it.”
He did exactly that, and then some.
Five days after striking out 11 in Game 2 and taking a loss, Williams came back with an even sharper performance when Cleveland needed it most. In the biggest start of his career, he delivered one of the finest October outings the Guardians have ever gotten from a starter.
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