Cleveland’s “Guardiac Kids” Walk Off Yankees, Win a Game 3 Thriller

Home runs trump singles and doubles, and for that reason it looked like the New York Yankees were going to beat the Cleveland Guardians in ALDS Game 3. Buoyed by a pair of two-run blasts, with a solo shot thrown in for good measure, the team that led baseball in long balls (254) in the regular season was poised to push the contact-oriented club that finished with exactly half as many to the brink of elimination.

It didn’t happen. Instead, yet another chapter in late-inning heroics was written by a team looking for its first World Series title since 1948, as Cleveland rallied for three runs in the ninth inning to walk off New York, 6–5 and take a 2–1 series lead in the best-of-five ALDS. The Guardians can clinch their first pennant series trip since 2016 in Game 4 on Sunday.

The Guardians took an early lead against Luis Severino. Steven Kwan led off the bottom of the first inning with a double, and with one out and runners on the corners, Josh Naylor hit a ball that shortstop Isiah Kiner-Falefa couldn’t handle. Ruled a single, it plated Kwan and set Cleveland up for what might have been a big inning. It wasn’t to be: The Guardians ended up stranding two runners in scoring position when the slumping Andrés Giménez — just seven hits in his last 42 at-bats with 16 strikeouts going into the game — fanned on a full-count pitch.

Another chance for a crooked number came in Cleveland’s next turn, when Kwan singled home Gabriel Arias, who had doubled to open the bottom of the second, with one out, but Severino induced back-to-back flyouts to leave a pair of runners stranded once again. Through two innings, the Guardians had six hits, but their lead was only 2–0.

One swing of the bat tied the game in the top of the third. Aaron Judge, who was 0-for-9 with eight strikeouts in the series — and somehow just 2-for-38 in his postseason career versus Cleveland — pummeled a Triston McKenzie fastball over the centerfield fence with Oswaldo Cabrera aboard. The blast, his 63rd on the season and first of these playoffs, had a 113.7-mph exit velocity and traveled 449 feet.

Cabrera, who was called up in August, hit six home runs in the regular season. His seventh of the year came two innings after Judge went deep, giving the Yankees a 4–2 lead. New York was still being out-hit but had scored twice as many runs.

In the bottom of the sixth, MLB’s youngest team — Terry Francona’s club has been dubbed “The KinderGuardians” — narrowed the deficit to 4–3. The rally came via three straight two-out singles by Giménez, Arias, and pinch-hitter Will Brennan, but once again a pair of runners were left stranded, as Lou Trivino, on in relief of Severino, got Myles Straw to line out to end the inning. For the third time in the game, hits were strung together, but not enough to make up for what Aaron Boone’s sluggers were doing.

That squander proved costly. Two batters into the top of the seventh, Harrison Bader hit New York’s third homer of the game, a solo shot, to push the lead to two runs once again. The Yankees now had five runs on five hits; the Guardians had nine hits but just two for extra bases and had left four runners stranded in scoring position. Severino deserves credit for making big pitches when he needed to, and also for settling in after a bumpy first two frames. The New York bullpen likewise did its job, keeping Cleveland scoreless through the eighth.

What happened in the bottom of the ninth inning was equal parts shocking and predictable. The Guardians won 12 times this season in games they trailed through seven innings, and they had an MLB-high 29 wins in their final at-bat. Late-inning heroics is what the KinderGuardians do. But a two-run deficit for a team with no power is a tough hill to climb. What’s more, the Yankees had never lost a postseason game entering the ninth with a multi-run lead — as in, 167–0 in those situations all-time.

But after Wandy Peralta retired Luke Maile to start the ninth, Straw, Kwan, Rosario, and José Ramírez stroked consecutive hits off the lefty and his replacement, right-hander Clarke Schmidt, bringing Cleveland to within 5–4. The bases were loaded. Schmidt fanned Naylor for the second out, bringing up Wild Card Series hero Oscar Gonzalez.

This time there would be no squander. The 24-year-old Gonzalez, whose walk-up music is the SpongeBob SquarePants theme song, lined a single up the middle to score Kwan and Rosario for his second walk-off hit of the postseason, one day after his bloop single drove in the go-ahead run in extra innings of Game 2. The KinderGuardians — Cleveland’s “Guardiac Kids” — had done it again.