I am a self proclaimed baseball historian. I also was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. I still call it home having purchased a house in the Old Brooklyn neighborhood with my wife last Spring. So the Indians and now Guardians have been a big part of my life. I was born in 1987, so in my early years no one talked about baseball in this blue collar town on the shores of Lake Erie. The Indians were in the middle of a horrific 40 year playoff drought. They played in a broken down ballpark that they shared with the Browns called Cleveland Municipal Stadium.
In 1994, things started to change though. The Indians opened Jacob’s Field, a new fabulous ballpark that was designed to look and feel like the old parks from the 1920’s and 30’s. My earliest memories about baseball occur from this season. My father worked for a company that had purchased season tickets to use for taking clients who were visiting town, to see the brand new ballpark. If no clients were in town they distributed the tickets to their employees. The company had agreed to let my Dad have those four tickets to take his family to a game that August. I vaguely remember my Mom telling me that we were going to be going to a baseball game soon and that she thought I would enjoy it. Well, as many of you know, that 1994 season ended on August 12th, when the players and owners couldn’t agree on a new contract and a strike began. It ended up wiping out the entire rest of the season and playoffs and World Series. It alienated many fans, who to this day in some cases never came back. Our tickets had been for a game later in August, so we didn’t get to go.
I always wondered what that 1994 Cleveland Indians team would have done had the season been played to its completion. They were one game out of first place in the brand new Central Division and leading the Wild Card spot when the season abruptly ended. Fans had been attending games at “The Jake” in droves as the team was poised as a contender for the first time in well over 35 years. It was a devastating blow for a town hungry for a winner.
When the strike was finally settled in April of 1995 and the season was able to start, albeit 18 games shorter than normal, I did attend my first ever baseball game, and the Indians dominated all year in 1995, starting their magical 90’s run that saw them win two pennants and nearly win the 1997 World Series. It is what gave me a love for baseball that has been with me ever since.
I have seen so many seasons though that have ended so close to the final prize of a World Series. It weighs the heart of a fan down a bit with frustration.
Multiple seasons the Indians were easily the best team in baseball but just couldn’t quite get it done in October (1995 and 2017). On two other occasions, 1997 and 2016 they were a hot team exceeding expectations that ran out of steam just short in game seven of the World Series. Intermixed throughout the last 28 years has been many other contenders and a few rebuilding seasons, but never had there been quite a team like that 1994 team, full of mostly young players who had come up through the minors together and were learning how to win at the big league level. That question as to what that 1994 could have been like had they been able to play in October never had a chance to be answered. That is, until last year.
The 2022 Cleveland Guardians were debuting something new as well. Not a new ballpark this time, but a new name. Indians was out, due to a desire to remove the prospect of alienating anyone over a ‘racial’ team name, and Guardians, like thes statues that sit on the Hope Memorial Bridge outside the stadium, was in. Similar to 1994 too, was the team on the field, full of young players that were far from household names, save for Jose Ramirez, who on the day before the 2022 season got underway signed a long term contract extension, choosing to take less money to ensure he played in Cleveland for his entire career. No doubt his leadership would be needed for a team that would see 17 players make their major league debut and boast the youngest average roster in baseball for the 2022 season.
No joke, before the season began national news publications picked the Guardians to finish dead last in their division. Admittedly I didn’t go that far, but I figured they would be at best a .500 team, likely finishing in third place by season's end.
The Guardians began looking like the average team I was expecting, but they were doing so with a different approach from new hitting coach Chris Valaika. Instead of swinging for the fences all the time and accepting the strikeout as a common result, Valaika was preaching a contact first approach. In his view, the Guardians were a young and athletic team, featuring many players with above average speed. What better way to use that speed to an advantage than by teaching the players to do all they could to put the ball in play and then run their butts off to first base, forcing the opponent to make the plays and throw them out. This was resulting in a lot of infield hits and added baserunners for opponents to deal with from day one. While it wasn’t always transferring into more runs, it was giving the offense life.
I was definitely a skeptic to the legitimacy of the Guardians style of play for quite a bit of the season. I just kept expecting that this super young team, which started to get hot in June, was going to eventually run out of steam, but they just didn’t.
In late June they won three out of five against the Minnesota Twins, the division leader. All three of the wins saw the young Guardians facing deficits late in the game that they overcame to win. The most exhilarating of three saw them rally from a 6-3 deficit in the bottom of the 10th to win 7-6, capped off by Josh Naylor’s two out, two strike, opposite field two run walk off homer to the porch in left! Naylor jumped up and down and screamed triumphantly while rounding the bases and then head butting manager Terry Franona in the midst of an exuberant home plate celebration.
Talk about a young team having a lot of fun! And it was in that moment that the historian part of my brain jumped back to the 1994 Indians team. That team won 10 games in their final at bat in similar ways to what Naylor had just done. They were also a young team that no one knew what to expect from either. Could this 2022 team give us a possible idea of what the 1994 team could have accomplished had they been able to finish out that season?
Well as the 2022 season continued to leave me stunned and surprised each night as I watched them play, I began to legitimately believe this was in fact my chance to see before my eyes, one possible outcome the 1994 team could have enjoyed.
The Guardians stayed hot all summer long, winning many games with great pitching and with their insane contact first approach on offense which allowed them to capitalize on many late game opportunities to squeak out wins. They also looked like they were having a ball doing it, as the joy of just playing in the big leagues and tasting victory at that elite level was carrying these young men far.
In September they played the Minnesota Twins eight times in twelve days, due in part to the weird five game series at Progressive Field scheduled because of the week-long delayed start to the 2022 season due to a collective bargaining agreement fiasco. Everyone knew going into that stretch that the Guardians would be tested. Boy did the team respond, sweeping the Twins in their own ballpark on the front end of the matchups and then winning three of five at home. The biggest of the wins came in a fifteen inning marathon in the Saturday night cap of a doubleheader, which saw the young Guardians claw and fight to victory on Amed Rosario’s grounder turned error by Twins shortstop Jermaine Palacios that allowed the winning run to score.
The Guardians then went on to sweep their only other competition in the division, Chicago White Sox immediately afterwards, all but securing what came three days later in Texas, the Cleveland Guardians were Central Division Champions! They celebrated with the traditional champagne, yes, but then proceeded to have a full on pizza party, once again embracing their youth and fun wholesomeness that was making Cleveland fans fall in love with them.
Of course, the question still remained. Could the Guardians contact first approach win at all in October, where home runs tend to be king. The Guardians entered the Wild Card Series against the Rays, and swept the best of three series with dominant starting pitching and ironically enough, timely home runs, winning game one 2-1 on a Jose Ramirez sixth inning homer, and game two 1-0, which was a memorable 15 inning affair that showcased both teams stellar starting pitching, won on Oscar Gonzalez’s walk off bomb off former Indian Corey Kluber.
They then went into the AL Division Series and faced a harrowing opponent in the New York Yankees who disposed of them with ease in game one, 4-1 behind their dominant starter Gerrit Cole, and timely home runs from Harrison Bader and Anthony Rizzo. Game two after being delayed a day by rain would be tied at 2-2 in the tenth when the Guardians first displayed how their style of play could win a playoff game, scoring three times in the inning, keyed by Jose Ramirez hustling down the line on a bloop shot that fell in, allowing him to hustle all the way to third base due to erratic defense by the Yankees and then scored the go ahead run on an Oscar Gonzalez two strike bloop single.
Game three of the series in Cleveland provided the best example of the Guardian hustle and contact approach being legit, as the bottom of the ninth inning saw them provide a clinic on short swings and speed providing a parade of hitters and base runners moving things along long enough for Oscar Gonzalez once again to be the hero, slapping yet another winning hit up the middle for a two run walk off single which gave the Guardians an stunning 6-5 victory!
Now yes, in the end, Gerrit Cole again shut the Guards down in game four, sending the series back to New York where rain yet again delayed the series for a day, allowing the Yankees to bring their other star starter Nester Cortes back on three days rest, while the Guardians went with Aaron Civale who gave up a three run bomb to Genecarlo Stanton in the first inning and the Guardians just never recovered.
It was disappointing but not devastating to see the Yankees come back to win the series. They were the more experienced, better funded and just plain better team. However, the Guardians definitely turned a lot of national media heads with their surprising and out of nowhere run to the Central Division Championship. The Guardians definitely had some holes in their young lineup, and having another power hitter or two alongside all of the great contact hitters would have potentially made a big difference.
Which leads me back to the 1994 Indians. That team had holes too, but their holes were instead in their starting pitching, which I do believe would have led to them also being bounced from the playoffs before the World Series, had the strike not happened. The parallels between both the 1994 Indians and 2022 Guardians were very striking, and in the end, did give us a very likely answer to what the 1994 team could have accomplished. The echoes of that 1994 team made up of so many exciting young and yet proven players like Manny Ramirez and Jim Thome, alongside players entering their prime like Kenny Lofton, Carlos Baerga, Sandy Alomar Jr. and Albert Belle, merrily resounded around Progressive Field last summer when our new batch of potential stars were making their skills known. Could players like Steven Kwan, Andres Gimenez, Oscar Gonzalez, and Josh Naylor be the guys we will look back on with such fondness 30 years from now? I think they just may be! Jose Ramirez has already cemented his legacy as one of the greatest to have ever worn a Tribe/Guards uniform when he signed that long term deal last April. Then Andres Gimenez signed a seven year extension yesterday! It is likely that several of this group of young talent will follow suit, providing the opportunity to write quite a legacy over the next several years.
Like in 1994, when the Indians shored up their pitching holes by signing Orel Hershiser and Paul Assenmacher via free agency, the Guardians signed Josh Bell and Mike Zunino to provide some power boost to a young offensive lineup that should continue to showcase their base runner generating abilities in 2023. The previously mentioned 1995 Indians went on to have one of the single greatest regular seasons in baseball history on their way to the American League Pennant. Does this 2023 Guardians team have something similar in store? It is unlikely they will go on any kind of historic level of dominance like that, but another division title and trip to October baseball seems very likely, and in baseball, that automatically means you have a very legit shot at winning it all! Expectations are higher as we embark on what is sure to be a fun journey, picking up where last season’s party left off!
This offseason longtime Indians/Guardians fan, season ticket holder and faithful drummer of nearly 50 years passed away. Outside of radio voice Tom Hamilton, no single person may be more synonymous with summer in Cleveland, certainly in the Jacob’s Field era especially, than John Adams. While Covid and then chronic health concerns had kept him away from the ballpark since 2019, he still was always cheering them on, even from his nursing home room. Last season the Guardians honored him by placing a bench with a bronze replica of his drum in Heritage Park, and even played recordings of his drumming during rallies in the postseason. It is my hope they continue this practice regularly, not only to honor a local legend, but also because the echoes of that steady beat imploring players to perform and fans to cheer louder are part of the fabric of baseball at the corner of Carnegie and Ontario. Here’s to another special season of baseball in Cleveland, where hope is riding high as the mercury in a thermometer on a hot humid night off Lake Erie’s shores.
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