The Story of the 2022 Cleveland Guardians (thus far)
Money-and-small-ball.
If you were to guess who would go to the postseason in the 2022 preseason out of the AL Central, you probably would’ve said the Minnesota Twins or the White Sox – but you definitely would not have said the youngest team in the major league, the Cleveland Guardians, who took the AL Central by storm in the 2022 season. A classic Moneyball story in the making; they made it to the playoffs, but will they take themselves to the world series against record breaking teams like Dodgers or Yankees? To see precisely how this happened, we have to look deeper into this story, starting with the 2022 preseason and before.
Preseason and Before
There is not much to be said about the Guardians’ preseason efforts other than two major events, the signing of Jose Ramirez in the 2022 preseason, and the trades with the Mets in 2021; these two events were considered heavily bold and unwise at their respective times, but have proved to be incredibly valuable throughout the course of the 2022 season.
Jose Ramirez, or what I call him, the Guardian’s secret weapon, is an incredibly talented contact hitter that has been with Cleveland his whole career, where he would commonly achieve above a 0.850 OPS for most of his seasons. The Guardians extended his contract for seven more years at 141 million dollars, thus consolidating his time in Cleveland. Ramirez is an incredible player, and an icon for the Guardians, so this contract extension makes a lot of sense – but one has to ask, what about the rest of Cleveland’s lineup?
As we can see from the 2021 lineup, we see nothing incredible, in fact there’s a lot of mediocrity if we exclude Jose Ramirez and Franmil Reves. There are clearly a lot of problems with the 2021 Guardians (previously Indians), and batting was one of them. This table doesn’t mention pitching, but it was also a problem.
In 2021, Cleveland sits 2 points below league average in OPS+ and ERA+, and -1.3 wins above average; below average would be right terminology to describe Cleveland at this time.
The other main event in the 2021 preseason was the series of trades the Guardians did with the Mets (this isn’t the 2022 preseason, as there were no big trades in this season). The Guardians sent their big timers Francisco Lindor, and Carlos Carrasco to the Mets while they get INF Andres Gimenez, INF Amed rosario, RHP Josh Wolf, and OF Isiah Greene. The trade of Francisco Lindor and Carlos Carrasco, franchise superstars, was a detriment to Cleveland in 2021 and we can see this precisely with the mediocre stats the whole team put up.
In 2021 it seemed that the trade was more in the favor of the Mets than in Cleveland, because we don’t see much payoff in the players Cleveland got: Andres Gimenez, not even in the top 12 players or main starting lineup, and putting up a measly 74 OPS+, Amed Rosario, not a bad player by any means and putting up 101 OPS+, and the two minor leaguers Josh Wolf and Isaiah Greene. With virtually no change to the starting lineup from 2021 to 2022, everyone was skeptical of the new Cleveland Guardians, and no one expected them to make it to the postseason, so what happened in the face of these below average odds?
2022 Season
Above averageness is what happened for the Cleveland Guardians in 2022. I would say that they were excellent and brilliant during the season, however they were still sub 100 wins in total; any team that clears 100 wins during a season is truly a spectacle in any season, the Guardians were simply above average. A 0.568 win rate is great, but not insanity, just above average. I’m sure you see my point about the Guardians being above average this season, but to be above average is to be consistent, and consistency in baseball is an extraordinary feat to have in a team; the Guardians played a classic game of Moneyball this season and it has proven once again that sabermetrics is real and powerful. To begin let's take a look at their win-loss chart by Baseball Reference.
Now lets look at the San Diego Padres.
There is a ton of similarity between the two win-loss charts, most notably that the number of greens (wins) tend to match well with each other, but the magnitudes of the charts slightly deviate where the Padres dominated more. We see that in the middle of the season, the Guardians suffered a lot of consecutive losses (red) high in magnitude, while the Padres also suffered sequential losses but with lower magnitudes. However, on the edges (beginning and end of the season) we see the Guardians with lower magnitudes of losses compared to the Padres; also at the end of the season we see dominance by the Guardians.
The final wins-losses for the Guardians are 92-70, and 89-73 for the Padres; an overall victory for the Guardians. I should also mention that the payroll for the Guardians is 82 million dollars, while the payroll for the Padres is 237 million. You heard that right, a team with more than 150 million dollars (and Juan Soto) is less consistent than a team that changed their name a year ago. Sure, the Padres may have dominated more, but a win is a win in any form of data analysis no matter the score, and the Guardians understood this completely. This is moneyball and consistency in the making, and it’s truly a beautiful thing to see in a sport dominated by rich teams.
To add more salt in the wounds of the Padres, on the 24th of August we see the Guardians dominate the Padres in a 7-0 shutout. And on August 12th, the Guardians dominated the Blue Jays, a team with a 182 million dollar payroll, in a 8-0 shutout; another exemplary exhibition of the beautiful work the Guardians are doing to save baseball. This may be contradictory to mention based on what I said about dominance in a game not mattering, but when it’s a small franchise sticking it to a larger one: it definitely sends a message.
The Team and Its Players
We can’t talk about the Guardians without mentioning their secret weapon, Jose Ramirez, an incredible superstar that’s loved by all Guardians fans. Let’s look at what he’s putting up.
Given all the blue you’re seeing on the diagram, it may seem like he’s actually an under performer, however, if we look at Whiff%, K%, BB%, and Sprint Speed, we see exactly what he aims to do in the ballgame: he makes contact, he gets on base, he’s playing small ball, he gets hits (putting up a 0.355 OBP) and advances players on his team. Couple his contact strategy with the team’s excellent speed, and Ramirez is an RBI machine; this is proven as he is 3rd in the whole league in RBI. While we’re on the topic of speed, let’s talk about it for a moment.
This is the average sprint speed of the Guardians’ team in 2022, and we clearly see a cluster of its players above the league average in sprint speed, many of them far exceeding the league average.
Let’s take one of the best teams in baseball at the moment, the Los Angeles Dodgers, and look at their sprint speeds.
We see that most of players on the Dodgers regress to the league average, showing a clear dominance of speed by the Guardians.
Let’s look at the players in the trade we discussed earlier, Amed Rosario, and Andres Gimenez.
Generally we see them as a watered down version of Jose Ramirez, with somewhat questionable statistics, but regardless we see the strengths that cooperate with each other heavily, like both of their Sprint Speed, Rosario’s xBA and K%, and Gimenez’s OAA. We should look into Gimenez a little bit more, because this infographic leans towards him being subpar. Let’s look into how he performs in high leverage scenarios.
By looking at his high leverage metrics, we see true excellence by Andres Gimenez. Putting up a 1.097 OPS, and a 204 OPS+ in high leverage scenarios, he is the clutch player of the Guardians.
Both of these players were performing poorly in their time with the Mets, and this shows the deal they made paid off two years later!
The last player I will talk about will be Steven Kwan, the rookie that joined the Guardians this year, a rookie that has more walks(62) that strikeouts(60), is first among rookies in BA, hits, R, triples, and K-rate – a legend in the making.
Here we see stats that are not just comparable to rookies, but to all stars as well, being the best in Whiff% and K%, and being an excellent infielder with his incredible OOA, is an incredible feat that matches well with what the Guardians are playing – smallball.
If we look more into the contact game the Guardians specialize in, we see they do it incredibly well relative to the whole league.
We see the Guardians, and from the circled zone, we see a significant differential between them and the Houston Astros, and the rest of the league. If we couple this incredibly low Whiff% with the lowest strikeouts in the league against their batters, we have a team with amazing plate discipline. A team with high plate discipline gets on base, but a team with high plate discipline and incredible speed (as we talked about earlier) AND the third highest stolen bases in the league puts pressure on the opposing defense like no other team in baseball. This is not even considering them being the top 3 performers in Runners Left on Base, Intentional Bases on Balls, and sacrifice stats, emphasizing their ability to advance their runners unto the next base.
To create more run scoring opportunities and tire out the opposing pitcher, this is the way of the Guardians, and they showed that it works tremendously well.
All of what I’ve mentioned did not touch on the pitching performance of the Guardians, and to sum it up in a few words: they’re fantastic.
Putting up as a team, 3.46 ERA (5th), 3.75 FIP (9th), and 1.159 WHIP (5th), we see stats that compare to the teams with the highest payrolls in baseball like the Dodgers, Astros, and Yankees. We even see the excellence of the Guardians’ bullpen to be even better than those teams with the high payrolls, having 51 Saves (4th). Let’s take a closer look at the bullpen, and put it up to the Yankees.
Here we see the caliber of the Guardians’ relief roster, putting up an average ERA of 3.03 compared to the Yankees’ 3.30 average across their relief pitching (the Yankees have a payroll of 265 million dollars). I can talk about Statcast metrics as well and show how the Guardians simply get strikes and show the pitching arsenal of their pitchers, but the numbers speak for themselves here.
Final Thoughts
There you have it, a team that doesn’t get home runs, but makes insane contact, has legendary speed, and incredible plate discipline; not to mention absolute aces like Jose Ramirez and Steven Kwan, OR their brilliant bullpen. All of this to be just above average, and far from the best in the season, that goes to the Dodgers with their 111 wins. But this doesn’t matter, you don’t need to be spectacular and flashy to win the world series like the Kansas City Royals proved in 2015; the Guardians must remain consistent, be fast, and apply pressure just like they’ve been doing, and they’ll get far in the postseason. If they win the world series, then Moneyball will have worked once again, baseball would be saved from mega corporations like the Yankees or Padres, and my romanticism with baseball will increase to unseen heights.
Notes
A lot of what I wrote came from Jolly Oliver’s video on the Guardians, I just added a little bit more data visualization to my article.
I am a Dodgers fan, but if the world series ends up, Dodgers vs. Guardians, then I might have to root for the Guardians!