The Cleveland Guardians are in the American League Championship Series. They got there Saturday night at Progressive Field by beating the Chicago White Sox 2-0 in Game 5 of the ALDS, and they did it by striking out 21 batters.
That number is not a quirk of extra innings. Per the Elias Sports Bureau, 21 is the most strikeouts ever recorded in a game of nine innings or fewer, in the regular season or the postseason. Chicago managed three hits and put nine balls in play all night.
Gavin Williams set the tone. He struck out 12, needed seven pitches to get through the first inning, and did not allow a hit until Kyle Teel’s two-out single in the sixth. Two days earlier he had thrown 18 pitches to finish Game 4. Recording the last out of one elimination game and starting the next one makes him only the third pitcher in postseason history to do that.
Ramirez Homered Off a Pitch That Was Basically on the Ground
The scoring took one inning. Sean Burke retired the first nine Cleveland hitters before Steven Kwan singled to open the fourth, and then Jose Ramirez got a knuckle-curve that never found the zone. The pitch crossed 0.74 feet off the ground. Ramirez hit it out for two runs.
That is the lowest pitch ever hit for a postseason home run in the tracking era, which begins in 2008. It was also the entire Cleveland offense, and it was enough, because the bullpen gave nothing back.
Erik Sabrowski inherited a bases-loaded, two-out jam in the sixth and struck out Munetaka Murakami on five pitches. Hunter Gaddis got four outs. Cade Smith finished with a five-out save and struck out the side in the ninth. Smith and Gaddis each appeared in all five games of the series, joining a list of only 17 relievers to do that in a Division Series.
This Was a Pitching Staff, Not a Hot Streak
Cleveland piled up 75 strikeouts in the series, a Division Series record. The Guardians became the 11th team in 96 tries to win a best-of-five after dropping the first two games, and only the fourth to do it after losing the opening pair at home.
Chicago, for its part, won its first four postseason games of 2026 and then lost four straight. The White Sox reached the ALDS as the No. 6 seed after sweeping Houston in the Wild Card Series, which makes the ending harsher rather than softer.
Stephen Vogt now has to build a rotation out of whatever is left. Williams struck out 24 batters across 11 2/3 innings in the series, and he is not pitching Monday. Parker Messick is unlikely to be available for Game 1 either. Cleveland opens at Tampa Bay on Monday night with its two best starters on ice.
That is a real problem, and it does not erase what just happened. An 85-win team that spent two days on the edge of elimination answered with a shutout, a record strikeout total, and a home run off a pitch nine inches above the dirt. The Guardians have not won a World Series since 1948 and have not played in one since 2016. They are four wins from the second part of that.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.