The Morning Horsehide Herald — the Eleventh of October, Two Thousand and Twenty-Six

Is it spring training yet? No — the pennants are being decided, and spring must wait its turn.

The Game of the Day

ONE-AND-TWENTY STRIKEOUTS IN THE DRIZZLE AND A HOMER GOLFED FROM THE GRASSTOPS — WILLIAMS FANS TWELVE ON TWO DAYS' REST, RAMÍREZ SUPPLIES THE ONLY RUNS FROM BENEATH HIS OWN KNEES, AND CLEVELAND, TWO GAMES DEAD ON MONDAY, PACKS FOR THE PENNANT ROUND: GUARDIANS 2, WHITE SOX 0

The decider by the lake is settled by the two oldest instruments in Cleveland's kit — pitching, and José Ramírez: Gavin Williams, 48 hours removed from the first relief errand of his life, carries a no-hitter into the sixth and strikes out 12 to tie Charles Nagy's franchise postseason mark, the staff entire fans 21 Chicago batsmen, the most ever recorded in a nine-inning game of any month in the game's history, and Ramírez reaches down for a knuckle curve nine inches off the ground — the lowest pitch ever hit for a postseason homer in the tracking era — and barely clears the right-field wall with the two runs that make Cleveland the 11th club ever to climb from two games down in a best-of-five, the first since 2017, with the Rays waiting at their dome Monday night

The rain never quite stopped at Progressive Field on Saturday night, and neither did the strikeouts. Before 36,889 umbrella-minded believers, in a steady 65-degree drizzle, the fifth and deciding game of the American League Division Series resolved itself into the two commodities Cleveland has trusted since the deadball days — unhittable pitching and José Ramírez — and two hours and thirty-six minutes after the first pitch the scoreboard read Guardians 2, White Sox 0, the series 3 games to 2, and the season, for one of the Central's two quarrelsome neighbors, over.

Gavin Williams had called for this baseball. As this paper set down yesterday morning, the big right-hander closed Thursday's Game 4 with the first relief appearance of his professional life, then stopped by his manager's office to claim the Game 5 start he was always scheduled to make; the club hoped the 18-pitch cameo would read, in the final accounting, as a high-intensity side session. It read as prophecy. Williams faced one man over the minimum through three innings, struck out the side in the fourth, and did not permit a hit until Kyle Teel's two-out single in the sixth — a lone single, two walks and a hit batsman the whole of Chicago's account against him, with 12 strikeouts beside, his four-seamer averaging 99.1 miles the hour against a regular-season mean of 97.6.⁴ The dozen ties Charles Nagy's 1996 mark for the most in a postseason game in the franchise's books, and stands one shy of the winner-take-all record Tarik Skubal set only last October.⁴ When a walk to Miguel Vargas loaded the bases with two out in the sixth, Williams left to a standing ovation — "He ran out of pitches," said Stephen Vogt. "That's the only reason he came out of that game" — and Erik Sabrowski fanned Munetaka Murakami on five pitches to end the threat.⁴ The researchers of the Elias Bureau append the filigree: Williams is only the third pitcher in postseason history to record the final out of one game and start the next with elimination hanging over both, after Mordecai Brown in 1910 and Hank Borowy in 1945 — and the only one of the three whose club won the second game.⁵

The runs, both of them, belonged to the captain. At 9:03 by the Eastern clock the "Jo-sé! Jo-sé!" chant rolled around the grandstand; at 9:04, with Steven Kwan aboard and two strikes on him in the fourth, Ramírez reached down for Sean Burke's 78-mile-an-hour knuckle curve — a pitch measured at 0.74 feet above the earth, the lowest any man has hit for a postseason home run since the tracking instruments arrived in 2008, and the lowest of Ramírez's own career besides — and golfed it 348 feet to right, where it cleared the wall by a courtesy.⁶⁵ The building shook, the lights flickered, and the crowd sang him out of the dugout for a curtain call. The man himself dismissed the pitch-classification sciences entirely: "Come on! You know! It was a home run pitch!"⁶ He is the first Cleveland batsman ever to homer in consecutive postseason games with elimination at stake in both, and his ledger since the series turned — 5-for-12, four extra-base hits, seven runs driven in across Games 3, 4 and 5, after an 0-for-6 beginning — is the whole story of the comeback in one line.⁶³ "If there's one person on the planet I would not doubt, it's José Ramírez," said the club president Chris Antonetti; the reliever Sabrowski proposed, more economically, "Build the statue."³

And then there is the number that wants its own paragraph: 21. Williams, Sabrowski, Hunter Gaddis and the closer Cade Smith — the last two perfect across the final three innings, Smith collecting five outs for the save — struck out one-and-twenty Chicago batsmen, the most in any nine-inning game, regular season or postseason, in the recorded history of the major leagues. The previous postseason mark was 19, set in Game 3 of this very series, by this very staff.⁵ Cleveland's 75 strikeouts for the series are the most ever administered in a best-of-five, eleven clear of any other club's.⁵ Chicago's manager Will Venable declined every alibi: "I thought it was less about chase and more about being attacked in the zone... the story is just being able to put the ball in play."⁷ Burke, the losing pitcher, deserved kinder arithmetic — five innings, four hits, the two Ramírez runs his only blemish — and his manager called the fatal delivery "a good pitch, and obviously a better swing."⁶

So the Guardians stand as the 11th club in history to lose the first two games of a best-of-five and win it anyway, the first since the 2017 Yankees — who performed the trick, the records dryly note, in Cleveland — and just the fourth to do it after dropping the opening pair at home.⁵ A franchise that entered the evening 2-9 in win-or-go-home contests has now taken three straight elimination games, the same way it erased a five-and-a-half-game divisional deficit in September. "Backs against the wall!" Vogt hollered at the center of the clubhouse scrum, before the champagne interrupted him. "You boys showed up. You showed out... We've got eight more wins to go!"³ The first four are to be sought at Tampa Bay's dome, where the Championship Series opens Monday night at eight o'clock Eastern — the lakefront nine against the best record in the American League, 1948 against 1998, the two longest-suffering droughts left standing, and the account of it taken up elsewhere in this number.²

News Around the League

THE CURTAIN DESK: TONIGHT IN MILWAUKEE, A PAIRING SEEN THIRTEEN TIMES IN FIFTEEN HUNDRED OCTOBER GAMES — SKUBAL AND MISIOROWSKI, THE FIRST AND FOURTH ARMS IN ALL THE LAND, OPEN THE PENNANT ROUND AT EIGHT O'CLOCK

The National League's curtain rises this evening at eight o'clock Eastern at American Family Field, and the statisticians have done the arithmetic on what the ticket buys: a duel in the top one percent of all postseason pitching matchups of the last 55 years. By Baseball Savant's rolling measure of current form, Tarik Skubal is today the No. 1 pitcher in baseball and Jacob Misiorowski the No. 4 — and of the nearly 1,500 postseason starts since 1971, exactly 13 have paired two top-four arms against one another. Ranked by the average standing of the two starters, tonight ties for third-best ever, behind only Dwight Gooden against Mike Scott in the 1986 Championship Series — a 1-0 masterpiece in which Scott fanned 14 — and Roger Clemens against Dave Stewart in 1990.⁸

The particulars want little embroidery beyond what this paper has carried all week. Misiorowski, 16-5, led the entire major leagues in earned-run average (1.80), strikeouts (252), walks-and-hits per inning (0.80) and opponents' batting mark (.157), and against these same Dodgers owns a 1.59 figure across three career meetings; Skubal, the twice-laureled Cy Young man acquired from Detroit at the Deadline, carries a 1.97 earned-run average over seven career postseason starts into the assignment.⁹⁸ It is 103 wins against 100, the league's two best outfits, a rematch of last autumn's Championship Series — swept by Los Angeles — and the third such meeting since 2018. "When we play our brand of baseball... we're a really hard team to beat," says Christian Yelich; the Milwaukee faithful will add, sotto voce, that their club declined to be the highest bidder for Skubal in July, and that the risk of exactly this evening was the price of the prudence.⁹⁸

The margins of the card: Los Angeles frets over cold bats — Shohei Ohtani at .154 this October and Will Smith at .063 — while William Contreras, who led the majors in runs driven home in September, arrives slashing .375 for the Division round; the Dodgers' infirmary lists Blake Treinen as unlikely for the postseason, while Milwaukee reports itself whole.⁹ And the schedule holds one more enticement: both aces stand lined up to meet again in a potential fifth game at Los Angeles.⁸ The second sitting is Monday at five o'clock Eastern, before the series removes west for Wednesday's third.²

THE DOME DESK: MONDAY AT THE TROP, THE TWO LONGEST WAITS IN THE LEAGUE SIT DOWN TOGETHER — RASMUSSEN LIKELY FOR THE RESTED RAYS, WHILE VOGT PROMISES HIS OWN STARTER UPON WAKING

The American League's pennant round convenes Monday night at eight o'clock Eastern at Tropicana Field, and it is a meeting of the sport's two most patient congregations: Cleveland has not won the World Series since 1948, Tampa Bay never in the 28 years since the franchise first took the artificial turf — and one of the two is now guaranteed a seat at the Fall Classic table should it win four games.¹⁰²

The pitching ledgers could scarcely be less alike. The Rays, idle since Wednesday's sweep of New York, have their ace Drew Rasmussen lined up for the opener on extended rest — his last outing carried a no-hitter into the eighth inning — and a bullpen so little used in the Division round that the closer Bryan Baker worked every game with a day's rest besides.¹⁰ Cleveland, by contrast, spent everything by the lake on Saturday: Gavin Williams is unlikely before Thursday's third game, Parker Messick before Tuesday's second, and when Stephen Vogt was asked who takes the ball Monday, the manager laughed and said, "I'll let you know when I wake up tomorrow" — the plausible candidates being Tanner Bibee, the opener Daniel Espino, Joey Cantillo and Foster Griffin.¹⁰

The bloodlines cross in every direction, as they will among the league's thrifty houses: Junior Caminero, Yandy Díaz and Kevin Kelly all began as Cleveland chattel; Kevin Cash coached Cleveland's bullpen before his long tenancy in the Tampa Bay dugout; Vogt's own playing career opened 0-for-27 in a Rays uniform. The season series went 5-1 to Tampa Bay, 20 runs to 8, with half the meetings settled by a single run — these clubs pitch, catch the ball, and beat nobody but each other's patience.¹⁰ The ceremonial first ball Monday is entrusted to Carl Crawford, of the 2008 pennant winners.¹⁰

THE VALEDICTORY DESK: THE SOUTH SIDE FOLDS ITS TENTS WITH WET EYES AND A FULL SCRAPBOOK — FROM A HUNDRED LOSSES THRICE RUNNING TO A GAME 5, AND A CLUBHOUSE VOWING ITS RETURN

The visiting clubhouse at Progressive Field held the usual October inventory — tears, embraces, and the chairman at the door. Jerry Reinsdorf stood and thanked his White Sox man by man as they came off the field, the proprietor's acknowledgment of a season nobody ordered: a club that lost 100 games in each of the three preceding summers seized the league's final Wild Card, swept Houston from the bracket, led the mighty by two games in this series, and died at last by the strikeout, 21 of them on the final night, 75 across the five games.⁷

The elegies were defiant. "It was fun, but we didn't want to end it here," managed the second baseman Chase Meidroth, through some difficulty. "They pitched their asses off. They deserve to go to the next round. It sucks, but we'll be back." Munetaka Murakami, four times a strikeout victim on the night, called the club "still a very young team" and the loss a lesson for carrying forward; the right-hander Mike Vasil put the house position plainest: "This team will be back. There's no denying that. But we made a lot of people believe... White Sox baseball is back and we are here to stay."⁷

The ledger supports the optimism better than the obituary suggests. Chicago led the American League in runs (776) and walks (589) this season and stood third in home runs (211); it never lost more than four games running all year; and the core of the enterprise is young enough that the autumn reads as a down payment rather than a squandering. The franchise's winner-take-all record now stands 0-2 across its long history — and the Herald, which watched this club make the summer far more interesting than anyone contracted for, suspects that particular ledger will get further entries soon enough.⁷

THE FRONT-OFFICE DESK: THE ATHLETICS' PRESIDENCY GOES BEGGING — FULD OF THE PHILADELPHIAS DECLINES THE CROWN, AND A BOSTON MAN STANDS NEXT IN THE ANTEROOM

Word from the executive corridors, where October is hiring season for everyone eliminated from it: Sam Fuld, the general manager of the Phillies, has declined an offer to become the Athletics' president of baseball operations, by the account of ESPN's sources. The suitors move down their list — Taylor Smith, an assistant general manager with the Red Sox, remains a leading candidate for the post.¹¹

The Herald reads the refusal without astonishment. The Athletics, lately of Sacramento and bound eventually for Las Vegas, are offering a grand title attached to a franchise between addresses; Mr. Fuld, by contrast, already holds a chair in a contending organization. That the club's search now turns toward Boston's front office is noted here for the winter record — the game's executive carousel rarely stops turning once the first chair is declined.

The paper begrudges nobody a breath, but October grants none: tonight at eight by the Eastern clock the National League's argument opens in Milwaukee, Skubal against Misiorowski, a pairing the statisticians rank among the three finest ever printed on a postseason card; Monday the American League's opens at Tampa Bay's dome at eight, with the senior circuit's second sitting at five o'clock the same evening.² Yesterday this paper observed that one of the game's two long waits — Cleveland's or Chicago's — would grow a day shorter by nightfall. It was Cleveland's, by the margin of a pitch nine inches off the ground. The Herald will be at its post for all of it. Until the morrow's dispatch, keep your scorecards near and your enthusiasms nearer.

~ THE HERALD ~

The Herald Acknowledges Its Debts

MLB Box Scores — Sunday, October 11, 2026 — Boxscore
Baseball-Reference.com — Upcoming Schedule and Upcoming Dates — Baseball-Reference
Tim Stebbins, Guardians erase 0-2 hole, complete ALDS comeback to punch ALCS ticket — MLB.com
Tim Stebbins, What fatigue? Williams fans 12, flirts with no-no 2 days after closing Game 4 — MLB.com
Sarah Langs, 6 incredible stats from the Guardians' 21-K, Ramírez-fueled clincher — MLB.com
Martín Gallegos, 'The heartbeat of Cleveland,' Ramírez sends stadium into frenzy with go-ahead HR — MLB.com
Scott Merkin, White Sox magical season ends in Game 5 of ALDS: 'This team will be back' — MLB.com
Mike Petriello, Skubal-Miz matchup not just rare -- it's nearly unprecedented — MLB.com
Sonja Chen and Adam McCalvy, Dodgers-Brewers NLCS Game 1 FAQ (8 p.m. ET, FOX/FOX One) — MLB.com
Adam Berry and Tim Stebbins, Guardians-Rays ALCS Game 1 FAQ (Mon., 8 ET, TBS/HBO Max) — MLB.com
Sources: Phillies' Fuld declines offer to become A's president — ESPN