Yankees will have their work cut out for them against Guardians

It’s Cleveland.

Again.

But this time there's a trip to the World Series at stake.

The Yankees will open the American League Championship Series on Monday night at home against a familiar club, one they have faced often over the years in the postseason — the Guardians, whom they will be seeing in October for the fourth time in the last eight seasons.

“Obviously, Cleveland all year has been that front-runner in the Central and put together a real consistent, solid year,” Aaron Boone said Saturday afternoon while the Guardians were on their way to a 7-3 victory over the Tigers in Game 5 of that Division Series in Cleveland.

The Yankees battled the Guardians all season for the best record in the AL, edging them late to secure home-field advantage (The Yankees went 94-68 and the Guardians finished 92-69).

“They do it a lot of different ways,” said Boone, whose team went 4-2 against the Guardians. “A tremendous bullpen, athletic, they defend really well. They’re pretty balanced in their attack. Obviously, they have a couple of guys that can really hurt you in the middle of the order [with] a superstar player in [Jose] Ramirez.”

The Yankees got past the Guardians in a five-game ALDS in 2022. In 2020, the COVID-shortened season, they beat Cleveland in a best-of-three Wild Card Series at Progressive Field.

In 2017, the Yankees lost the first two games of the ALDS in Cleveland before winning three straight, including the deciding Game 5 at Progressive Field, to advance to the ALCS, where they lost to the Astros in seven games.

The last time the clubs met with a trip to the World Series on the line was 1998, when Cleveland gave that year’s history-making Yankees team their toughest postseason series. After going 114-48 in the regular season, the Yankees trailed two games to one before prevailing in six games.

The Yankees have lost twice in the playoffs to Cleveland, both of those coming in the Division Series, both of them memorable. There was the four-game setback in 2007, a series most remembered for a swarm of midges moving in off  Lake Erie and taking over the ballpark (then called Jacobs Field) late in a Game 2 loss, with the insects completely unhinging Joba Chamberlain. The 1997 series was best known for Mariano Rivera giving up the most memorable postseason homer of his Hall of Fame career, a tying shot in Game 4 by Sandy Alomar Jr. The Yankees — who had won the World Series in 1996 and would do so again from 1998-2000 — wound up losing that game and then dropped Game 5.

The late-1990s Cleveland teams were offensive powerhouses, which is far from the case with this year’s outfit other than annual AL MVP candidate  Ramirez (39 homers, 39 doubles, 41 stolen bases and 118 RBIs) as well as Josh Naylor (31 homers, 27 doubles and 101 RBIs). But the lineup, starting with dangerous leadoff man Steven Kwan, is scrappy and goes first-to-third well. In some ways, the Guardians mirror the pesky AL Central team the Yankees just beat in their Division Series, the Royals.

“They're more than capable to do more and more winning because of how they go about it,” Tigers manager A.J. Hinch said of the Guardians  on Saturday. 

The rotation is OK, but Cleveland’s real strength, as Boone mentioned, is its bullpen, anchored by closer Emmanuel Clase, who put together one of the best seasons a reliever has ever had, posting a 0.61 ERA with 47 saves in 74 appearances.

“They're so hard to score against and so hard to match up against,” Hinch said of the Cleveland bullpen. “And that's why they won 90-plus games, and that's why they're advancing.”

The Yankees' bullpen was among the best in the sport the first two months of the season before taking a nosedive for nearly three months and then righting itself in September and October. Especially October.

Against the Royals, the group did not allow an earned run in 15 2/3 innings. Luke Weaver continued to dominate in the closer’s role, which he assumed from Clay Holmes down the stretch, saving all three of the Yankees’ victories. Tommy Kahnle’s changeup, which one rival scout called “pretty much unhittable right now,” helped him strike out three and not allow a hit in three ALDS appearances. And Holmes, with a regained focus and emphasis on throwing his bread-and-butter pitch, the sinker, rather than continuing to be slider-happy, appeared in all four ALDS games, scattering three hits and striking out three.

“Rock-solid,” Gerrit Cole said of the Yankees' bullpen. “Those guys have faced some ups and downs this year, and they persevered. It's made them better. They want the ball. We want them with the ball.”