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\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tGetty\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
CLEVELAND, OHIO – OCTOBER 10: Cade Smith #36 of the Cleveland Guardians celebrates after defeating the Chicago White Sox in game five of the American League Division Series at Progressive Field on October 10, 2026 in Cleveland, Ohio. (Photo by Nick Cammett\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n
No matter what changes Major League Baseball makes in the years ahead, the games themselves will remain nine innings. That\u2019s a feature of America\u2019s pastime that isn\u2019t going anywhere.<\/p>\n
And with three outs an inning, that means it takes 27 outs to set down the opposing order enough times to win, if you have more runs than them by the time you\u2019ve reached 27 outs.<\/p>\n
So consider, then, what the Cleveland Guardians did on Saturday night in the decisive Game 5 of the ALDS against the Chicago White Sox<\/a>.<\/p>\n Cleveland recorded 27 outs in its 2-0 victory.<\/p>\n And of those 27 outs, 21 were strikeouts.<\/p>\n Guardians Set Record<\/p>\n Not only had a team never done that before in a nine-inning playoff game \u2014 record 21 outs via strikeouts \u2014 a team in MLB<\/a> had never done that before in any game, including the regular season.<\/p>\n And given the lack of outs remaining that could\u2019ve been strikeouts, it\u2019d be hard for any team to ever do better than this.<\/p>\n Even this took until the year 2026 to achieve. And sure, it\u2019s a strikeout-heavy era, and the White Sox are a strikeout-happy team. All the stars aligned.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s still got to go down as one of the most remarkable records ever set in a playoff game.<\/p>\n The Guardians\u2019 pitchers threw the ball toward home plate over and over again, as happens in every baseball game.<\/p>\n On this night, though, the White Sox hardly ever hit it.<\/p>\n Guardians\u2019 Pitching Stats<\/p>\n The Guardians couldn\u2019t have done this without Gavin Williams, who was a question mark heading into Saturday\u2019s game.<\/p>\n Williams had closed out the final three outs on Thursday in ALDS Game 4, throwing 18 pitches, so Cleveland wasn\u2019t sure he would have as much gas in the tank for Saturday night.<\/p>\n The pitcher they call \u201cThe Big Rig\u201d definitely had a full tank, though.<\/p>\n Williams was nearly unhittable. He went 5.2 innings, allowing one hit and two walks while striking out 12.<\/p>\n His fastball hit 101 miles per hour on one strikeout. His curveball and sweeper were both sharp, dropping in for strikes early in counts before missing bats late.<\/p>\n Mostly, though, Williams just threw that heater by people, over and over again.<\/p>\n When he came out with the bases loaded in the sixth and Erik Sabrowski came in, the southpaw threw a fastball right past a swinging bat for strike three to escape the jam against the only guy he faced.<\/p>\n Hunter Gaddis then came in for four outs, allowing two hits but striking out four for all the outs he got.<\/p>\n And then it was closer Cade Smith. Smith went 1.2 innings, getting the final five outs. Four of them were strikeouts.<\/p>\n The ninth inning was fitting.<\/p>\n Munetaka Murakami struck out swinging.<\/p>\n Andrew Benintendi struck out swinging.<\/p>\n Tristan Peters struck out swinging.<\/p>\n There\u2019s never been a night of pitching quite like the one the Guardians put together on Saturday night at the corner of Carnegie and Ontario.<\/p>\n \n\t\t\tBilly Heyen<\/a> Billy Heyen is a Heavy contributor with focus on the NFL and MLB. He is a 2019 graduate of Syracuse University who spent his senior year following Jim Boeheim’s basketball team around the country. His reporting work has also included extensive work for The Sporting News, the Sandusky Register and Rochester’s Democrat & Chronicle. Adventures in sports writing have also led to in-person coverage of the Buffalo Sabres, Cleveland Guardians, U.S. men’s national soccer team and a variety of minor league baseball stories. More about Billy Heyen<\/a>\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Getty CLEVELAND, OHIO – OCTOBER 10: Cade Smith #36 of the Cleveland Guardians celebrates after defeating the Chicago…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":924376,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[558],"tags":[64,63,591,85],"class_list":["post-924375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-mlb","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/924375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=924375"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/924375\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/924376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=924375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=924375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=924375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}