CLEVELAND — If someone had told you back in March that the Cleveland Guardians would go on to win their fifth division title in the past nine seasons, you might’ve reasonably assumed they’d do so on the back of yet another standout rotation.
Homegrown starting pitching has been a hallmark of the organization for years now, and another promising wave of young arms appeared to be coalescing entering 2024. Mainstays Shane Bieber and Triston McKenzie both battled injuries for much of last season but reported to camp feeling good and eager to bounce back in a big way, with Bieber looking especially sharp in the early going.
Beyond that familiar duo, three young arms were entering their sophomore seasons after promising rookie campaigns: crafty left-hander Logan Allen (3.81 ERA in 125.1 IP), hard-throwing righty Gavin Williams (3.29 ERA in 82 IP) and Tanner Bibee, whose excellence across 25 starts in 2023 earned him a second-place finish in AL Rookie of the Year voting. While health and inexperience loomed as potential pitfalls, there was substantial optimism that the upside of the starting staff could fuel a return to the postseason.
Instead, things unraveled rather quickly. Williams was shut down before Opening Day due to elbow soreness, missed the first three months of the regular season and has battled inconsistency since he returned. Allen and McKenzie were both demoted to Triple-A midsummer after their ERAs ballooned above 5.00, and neither has since reemerged as a viable option. And the most crushing blow, of course, was losing Bieber.
After a winter of speculation about the possibility that he would be traded entering the final year of his contract, Cleveland’s decision to hold on to the former Cy Young Award winner initially appeared prudent: Bieber was dominant in his first two starts of the season, striking out 20 batters over 12 scoreless innings. But amid the early success, he reported elbow pain that eventually became too much to overcome, resulting in Tommy John surgery on April 12.
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And so, with 80% of the projected rotation either injured or drastically underperforming, Cleveland turned to a quartet of veteran arms to fill the gaps. The signing of 32-year-old journeyman Ben Lively didn’t feel especially significant in December, yet he has made a career-high 28 starts for the Guardians out of necessity this season. While he has proven to be a capable option, Lively being second on the team in innings pitched wasn’t exactly Plan A entering the season.
The same sentiment applies to 37-year-old Carlos Carrasco, whose return to Cleveland after three years with the Mets was a nice homecoming story but not one that was intended to feature a substantial workload in the rotation; Carrasco posted a 5.64 ERA across 21 starts and was eventually DFA’d.
Cleveland also signed southpaw Matt Boyd in June and traded for Alex Cobb in July, two more experienced arms who have turned in several crucial outings in the second half. Boyd has been stellar in eight starts (2.72 ERA), while Cobb has looked good when on the mound, but blister issues have limited him to just three games, and he remains on the IL.
On the whole, it has been a rotation defined by inconsistency and unpredictability — with one notable exception: Bibee. Amidst all the turnover throughout the rotation, all the unexpected additions and subtractions over the course of the summer, the 25-year-old right-hander has chugged along uninterrupted, and now, he seems to be peaking at the perfect time.
On Tuesday, Bibee allowed one run across seven frames against the Reds to help the Guardians secure a first-round bye and home-field advantage in the ALDS.
“Pretty special,” skipper Stephen Vogt said of Bibee’s performance. “Wiggled his way out of trouble a couple times, and really, outside of those few innings, they couldn’t really get anything going. Fastball was great. Slider had a couple different shapes, the changeup and the curveball as well.”
Following another quality start last week against Minnesota, it was the first time this season that Bibee had pitched into the seventh inning in consecutive outings. He also lowered his ERA to 2.64 across 30 2/3 innings in September, his best mark in any calendar month this season.
“Tanner just seems to keep getting better and better each time out,” Vogt said.
While it has been smooth sailing for a while now, it’s worth noting that Bibee, too, was a source of some concern for Cleveland’s rotation earlier in the season. Consecutive clunkers in early May raised his ERA to 4.91 through eight starts, adding yet another layer of uncertainty to a rotation starting to show some cracks. Reflecting back now, Vogt admires the degree to which Bibee was able to turn his season around:
“Watching him kind of go through some struggles early in the year and rebound from that and turn himself into one of the more consistent starters in the American League … It just speaks to, he’s never satisfied, he always wants to get better,” Vogt said.
Indeed, here are Bibee’s ranks among qualified AL starting pitchers since those two rough outings against the Angels and Tigers back in May:
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3.04 ERA — 7th
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1.04 WHIP — 4th
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20.9% K-BB% — 5th
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2.8 fWAR — 8th
In short, Bibee has provided some much-needed stability and become an ace in Cleveland’s rotation, which Vogt does not take lightly.
“What Tanner has accomplished this year, he should be very, very proud of,” he said. “He’s the leader of a staff that won the division, and [he] stepped in big when we lost Shane Bieber.”
Last season, Bibee’s arrival represented an intriguing sequel to Bieber’s remarkable development story. Like Bieber, a fourth-round pick out of UC-Santa Barbara in 2016, Bibee was somewhat overlooked by scouts as an amateur. Although he always exhibited strong command and pitchability as the ace for Cal State Fullerton, his modest stuff did not reflect that of a future impact big-league starter, and so he fell to the fifth round in 2021.
But as with Bieber, Bibee’s velocity and overall arsenal ticked up in pro ball under the tutelage of Cleveland’s renowned pitching development group, and his excellent feel for pitching sustained. As a result, he zoomed through the minor leagues and soon established himself as a frontline arm for the Guardians, first alongside Bieber as a rookie and now in Bieber’s absence for a team with World Series aspirations.
Bibee would in theory be scheduled to make one last regular season start in Game 162 on Sunday against Houston, but he will instead throw a simulated game in the days leading up to the ALDS opener on Oct. 5 at Progressive Field. So while the book is closed on his regular season, Bibee knows that his most important starts of 2024 are still ahead of him. In the meantime, he’s focused on maintaining what has worked so well for him for much of this season.
“I don’t know if the process changes too much,” he said. “I think I’m just trying to find my best stuff, trying to get my body, my mechanics, in the best place possible.”
With an elite, ultra-deep bullpen headlined by the best closer in baseball in Emmanuel Clase, the Guardians — whose rotation ERA ranks 23rd and whose 43 quality starts rank 28th in MLB, with Bibee accounting for 12 — won’t necessarily need their starting pitchers to cover a high volume of innings in order to win games next month. Bibee, though — especially the version we’ve seen lately — is capable of delivering the kind of outing that can set the tone in a postseason series.
As the projected Game 1 starter, he’ll have the opportunity to meaningfully sway Cleveland’s chances of advancing deep into October from the very first pitch of the ALDS. For a young pitcher on the verge of his postseason debut and a young team hungry for a taste of playoff baseball, the anticipation has been building in the Cleveland clubhouse in recent weeks.
“For me, not being in this position before, I’m super excited,” Bibee said. “Throughout an 162-game season, you start the year, you’re usually super excited to come to the ballpark and win some games and start the season off the right way. Then you kind of hit a little lull post-All-Star break. And then when you get into this time, it really seems like the want to be here and the want to win, it’s a little rejuvenated.
“The feeling never went away, but it’s kind of just shot up, adrenaline shot up, and it’s fun. It’s fun baseball when it really means something, when it’s coming down to it.”
