CLEVELAND — Six minutes after the final out of the Guardians’ ALDS Game 1 victory, the familiar twang returned.
Rocky Top, you’ll always be
Home sweet home to me
Sometime in August, Cleveland pitcher Ben Lively loaded “Rocky Top” by the Osborne Brothers onto the team’s postgame playlist to light-heartedly initiate newcomer Lane Thomas, a native Tennesseean. The song sticks out in a sea of EDM tracks, but it has become a clubhouse staple. Even Emmanuel Clase, who hails from a rural Dominican Republic town 1,400 miles from Knoxville, danced with abandon to the southern ditty during the club’s playoff clinch celebration last month.
There it was again, moments after the Guardians secured a 7-0 win, a win similar to so many of the 92 they amassed during the regular season. A dominant bullpen. Some timely hitting. And a toast to the Volunteer State.
This is the blueprint to ending a 76-year drought and awarding Cleveland an early November parade down E. 9th Street, past the Erie Street Cemetery and the statues of Larry Doby and Bob Feller, members of the city’s most recent championship baseball team. Just enough starting pitching and offense to set the table for an overbearing bullpen built to squeeze the life out of the opposition.
This is the October showcase they’ve been scripting all along.
It just looks nothing like the original version sketched in the spring, aside from the cloudless sky, national anthem flyover and capacity crowd. The script has been scrapped and rewritten a handful of times as the winning formula took shape.
The path to victory on Saturday afternoon started with Tanner Bibee, who tossed 4 2/3 scoreless innings after spending the week nursing what he described as “a lead block” of nerves in his stomach. With a couple more sterling efforts on the big stage, catcher Austin Hedges declared: “No one’s going to be calling him ‘Bibby’ anymore.”
No, it’s “BYE-bee,” for any outsiders introduced to Cleveland’s ace in Game 1. And that’s different from Shane Bieber (BEE-burr) and Tyler Beede (BEE-dee), two other parts of the Guardians’ Opening Day pitching puzzle. Or, as Hedges referred to the trio by their nicknames: “Biebs, Beeds and Bibes.”
There’s less confusion now. Bieber spent last weekend in Scottsdale constructing a crib, not gearing up for a playoff start. He’s six months removed from Tommy John surgery and will hang around the club during its postseason journey. He supplied guidance to Bibee on Saturday morning to help eradicate his nerves.
Beede doled out $550 for the Guardians’ famed wrestling belt, handed out to the star of each win. But he disappeared to Triple A after a month on the roster. There’s no Triston McKenzie or Logan Allen. Gavin Williams has been relegated to the bullpen.
Things are different, and yet they still work because of the bullpen’s sheer dominance. The four horsemen — Clase, Cade Smith, Hunter Gaddis and Tim Herrin — all logged sub-2.00 ERAs during the regular season, and they pieced together 4 1/3 scoreless frames in relief of Bibee on Saturday. Clase is the renowned stalwart who had sealed an All-Star Game. The other three were unknown commodities when this team started plotting its path to October. They started racking up zeroes in April and never stopped.
When Vogt removed Bibee in the fifth, the starter did his typical look-up-at-the-sky maneuver as if a lack of eye contact with the manager might convince Vogt to do a 180 and retreat to the dugout. But Bibee understood the decision, especially when the bullpen door swung open and Smith, the 6-foot-5 Canadian cyborg, jogged toward the mound.
“It’s just so comforting,” said catcher David Fry, “being like, ‘All right, Cade Smith, here you go. You’re going to strike out pretty much everybody you face.’”
Not “pretty much.” He did strike out all four hapless hitters he faced on Saturday. Fry and Hedges conducted their customary pregame routine in the dugout in which they imitate Vogt and bench coach Craig Albernaz. They mimicked the coaches suggesting they turn to Smith in the second inning. And, truly, who could argue such a strategy?
“There’s no heartbeat,” Vogt said of Smith’s icy demeanor. “There’s no pulse.”
No, only the DNA of the league’s most lethal fastball.
The Guardians will lean on Smith, Clase, Gaddis and Herrin until they topple over. But for six months, they’ve barely budged.
Throughout the season, Hedges preached that the Guardians were treating every game like a playoff game so that when they ultimately reached the postseason, nothing would seem any different. There would be no daunting atmosphere, no new sense of urgency, no debilitating dread of the moment.
On Saturday, everything unfolded as they had hoped.
Hedges leaned against the wall beside his locker after the game, sporting a Cleveland Browns winter cap and a white Cleveland Cavaliers playoff T-shirt.
“I love this place,” he said. “These people deserve a World Series. This organization deserves a World Series. It’s been too good for too long.”
The Guardians have the blueprint. And if they can reach the mountaintop for the first time since 1948, that would mean another round of “Rocky Top”.
“Today was the first step,” Hedges said. “Ten more.”
(Top photo of Lane Thomas: Jason Miller / Getty Images)
