The Guardians’ bullpen had a near-perfect season — until the end

CLEVELAND — On Saturday night, Guardians manager Stephen Vogt jabbed a finger in the direction of each member of his bullpen, one by one, summoning each of the four relievers most responsible for the Cleveland success this year. For what they did was remarkable and, at the end, unsustainable, with their extraordinary workload ending in a performance collapse.

“They carried us here,” Vogt said. “If it wasn’t for those guys, we wouldn’t have gotten this far. They deserve a ton of credit.”

Emmanuel Clase is widely regarded as baseball’s best reliever — the best reliever on the planet, his manager called him, and by far the league’s top reliever by WAR. Cade Smith is likely to get strong consideration for AL Rookie of the Year. Hunter Gaddis and Tim Herrin were exceptional. Together, the big four had 290 combined innings and a 1.49 ERA. And in the series against the Yankees, that group allowed 11 runs in 13 innings. Clase was charged with the loss in Game 4, and Gaddis surrendered Juan Soto’s game-winning three-run homer in Game 5.

The relievers’ credo is that they won’t acknowledge weariness, and that they will take the ball if asked. The Guardians won the AL Central largely because they had the most effective relievers — their bullpen ERA was more than half a run better than any other team’s — and with those four Cleveland pitchers ranking among the top 11 in appearances, Vogt kept handing them the ball, into October. Clase threw in seven of Cleveland’s 10 playoff games, Gaddis in eight, and Herrin and Smith each appeared in nine. And performance cracks began to show.

“I mean, everybody is tired,” Vogt acknowledged after the Game 4 loss. “I think we’ve used them a lot. We’ve had to. It’s who we are.”

Teams that rely on bullpens as much as the Guardians have in this postseason have not prevailed in the World Series. Over the past decade — a time in which teams have increasingly relied on relievers — only two teams have won the World Series when relievers threw more than 50% of their club’s innings. In 2021, the Braves won with their bullpen throwing 53.8% of Atlanta’s innings in the postseason, and in 2020, the Dodgers’ relievers threw 52.3% of that team’s innings. Going into Game 5 in the Yankees series, the Cleveland relievers accounted for a staggering 62.4% of the Guardians’ innings in the playoffs.

Smith threw 152 pitches over the 15 days of the Guardians’ postseason, and in Game 4 of the series against the Yankees, he surrendered a home run for only the second time in 2024, to Giancarlo Stanton. By any definition, it wasn’t a bad pitch: a fastball just off the outside corner to Stanton, who is bigger and stronger than just about all of his peers not named Aaron Judge and was able to extend his arms to somehow pull a homer over the left-field wall. Guardians catcher Austin Hedges defended his pitcher.

“He’s the same Cade Smith he’s always been, and that Giancarlo Stanton guy is really good at baseball and hits a lot of homers in the postseason,” Hedges said. “He hit his best pitch. Cade’s fastball is the best pitch in baseball, and we went down with our strengths.”

But Smith’s fastball was not close to being his best fastball: Its velocity of 94 mph was markedly less than his regular-season average of 96 mph. Smith stood at his locker after Game 4 and answered every question in a quiet monotone, stringing together his words in run-on sentences. He indicated he was not aware of his diminished velocity. “But I’ll take a look at it, rewatch it, talk to the pitching coaches and see what’s going on,” he said, “and see if there’s something we need to correct.”

It was also the third time in five days that the Yankees’ hitters had seen Smith; they would see him a fourth time in Game 5. As Ron Darling adroitly noted on the TBS broadcast, managers will often yank starting pitchers out of games before opponents can see them a third time, but in the postseason, hitters often see the same relievers over and over. Hedges, who won a World Series ring with the Rangers last year, is as familiar with this as anyone.

“That’s one of the beauties of the playoffs, to get to face teams over and over again,” he said. “You’ve got to be creative in how you’re attacking guys in the batter’s box; they’re going to attack you differently. It’s a game of adjustments, and whoever wins the adjustment game is probably going to win the series.”

Hedges also acknowledged the fatigue of relievers at this time of year.

“That’s real,” he said. “It’s the middle-end of October. Everyone has been training since the offseason to prepare for a six-month season. As much as you know your goal is to win the World Series, there’s only a handful of teams that play this long. It’s exhausting. You can see it in the past — there are plenty of pitchers who pitched a lot in the postseason and they come back the next year and they’re just not the same. Just because that extra month, and the pressure of each moment, it’s tough and it’s exhausting. It’s very real.”

This extraordinarily heavy reliance on relievers was not part of some master plan by Vogt in his first year as manager or by the Guardians’ front office; this is an organization long renowned for development of starting pitchers, from CC Sabathia to Cliff Lee to Corey Kluber to Shane Bieber.

But this year, Bieber — the AL’s Cy Young Award winner in 2020 — lasted only two starts before going down with a season-ending arm injury. Triston McKenzie seemingly had a breakout in 2022, posting a 2.96 ERA in 191⅓ innings, but struggled so badly this year that he was demoted to the minors. Similarly, Logan Allen was sent down. The Guardians worked to improve their rotation before the trade deadline, but, from a thin pool of starting pitchers, they added Alex Cobb, and they later signed left-hander Matthew Boyd. Vogt had to make the most of what he had, and what he had was a dominant bullpen propping up a rotation that struggled to contribute innings.

That continued into this postseason, with Tanner Bibee and Boyd effectively functioning as a two-man rotation and Vogt regularly calling on his bullpen to much less solid results than through the regular season. Clase allowed two homers during the six months of the regular season, and, over a span of eight pitches in Game 3 Thursday, he allowed back-to-back homers to Judge and Stanton.

The next day, before Game 4, a video was posted on Clase’s Instagram account highlighting his past awards — reminders of his preeminence as the reliever widely regarded as the best in baseball. To one longtime big league hitter, however, the video seemed more like a sign of a pitcher trying to reassure himself. Hours later, the Yankees got to Clase again, for two more runs on three hits and a walk. Alex Verdugo talked about how the Yankees were able to get Clase to work up in the strike zone, then take advantage. “I haven’t been able to execute my pitches,” Clase said after Game 4. “A credit to them for their at-bats.”

Even still, Vogt made it clear before Game 5: He would go to Clase and his relievers if they were needed, and with the Guardians playing to extend their season, he called on them again.

On Saturday night, Smith, Herrin and Clase all contributed zeros in their work, but when Gaddis came on to pitch the top of the 10th inning, he walked Austin Wells with one out. Shortstop Brayan Rocchio mishandled a ball, and the Yankees had men on first and second. Gaddis struck out Gleyber Torres, but Juan Soto kept fouling off pitches, nodding his head as he stared at the pitcher — Soto telling the Guardians pitcher he could see everything, could hit everything. And on the seventh pitch of the plate appearance, Gaddis threw a 95 mph fastball and Soto wrecked it — just the fifth homer hit off Gaddis all year.

It was worst possible way to end what had been the best possible season for the quartet of Cleveland relievers.