The Guardians are one win away from sending a message that a lot of baseball people probably don’t want to hear.
After Thursday afternoon’s 3-2 victory over the Rays in Game 3 of the ALCS at Progressive Field, Cleveland is now just two wins from reaching the World Series. On its face, it’s the kind of October run that baseball loves to romanticize: a club that hasn’t won a championship since 1948 now sitting on the brink of the Fall Classic. But the optics are hard to ignore.
Cleveland won only 85 games in the regular season, yet it still claimed the division, earned a first-round bye and put itself in position to play for a championship. That alone makes this run a little strange, especially with the Mariners still fresh in the background for those who spent 2026 watching Seattle fall short in the AL West. The comparison isn’t exact, but the frustration feels awfully familiar.
The broader baseball point is even sharper. The Guardians have become a reminder of a model that has worked well enough to keep a team in the mix, but not necessarily to make it feel like a powerhouse. They’ve been good, not great, for a while now, and now that formula has them staring at a trip to the World Series.
There’s precedent, of course. The Diamondbacks got to the World Series in 2023 after winning 84 games.
But that felt like a one-off. Cleveland’s run looks more like the product of a long-term approach - a team built to pile up solid seasons without necessarily breaking through as an elite one.
That’s where Jerry Dipoto and the Mariners enter the conversation again.
Dipoto’s old line about winning 54 percent of the time has never been easy to forget, especially with the way it framed sustained success as the path to bigger things.
“That is true in the Wild Card era [since 1995]. It is true in the divisional format dating back to 1969,” Dipoto said.
“You’ve got, I think, an 85 or 90% chance of reaching a World Series if you make that your goal. If we make winning the World Series your goal, we will do insane things that will cut the sustainability part of the project short.
That’s not how we think.”
The Mariners actually outperformed that level from 2021-25, and they were one of only four major league teams to win at least 85 games in each of those seasons. And yet, the World Series never came into view.
That’s what makes Cleveland’s run so uncomfortable for some fans. If this is the payoff for aiming in the middle and trusting the numbers, then maybe the numbers don’t tell the whole story. Maybe the safer route just leaves you stuck there - good enough to matter, not good enough to finish the job.
The expanded playoff field only makes that argument louder. In a format like this, a team doesn’t have to be dominant to get in.
It just has to get hot at the right time. That’s the logic Cleveland is living out right now, and if the Guardians finish the job, it will only strengthen the case for teams that settle for being solid and trust October to do the rest.
For a lot of fans, the more appealing outcome would be the opposite: the 98-win Rays battling back to join the 103-win Brewers in the World Series, a matchup that would reward teams that pushed all the way toward greatness. But if Cleveland keeps rolling, the lesson will be different.
And for Mariners fans, it would come with a cruel extra edge - another reminder of what 2026 in Seattle could have been.
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Boston Smith is the one worth watching there. The catching prospect has impressed offensively in the minors, and the Mariners gave him a look in left field in the Arizona Fall League, a sign they may be open to broadening his role. After arriving in an earlier trade, Smith is starting to emerge as a player Seattle could evaluate not just as a bat, but as a potential answer to a pretty important roster hole. [Read more 🡒]