CLEVELAND — On the day’s 432nd pitch, three minutes shy of five hours after the first pitch, Oscar Gonzalez swung Thor’s hammer and 35,000 sober and shivering souls (beer sales were cut off nearly three hours earlier) howled in delight.
This team put on an extraordinary performance and the final result was 15 innings filled with high anxiety and, well, nothing. There was a lot of waiting, waiting, gasping, and even more waiting.
And wait.
And wait.
The longest scoreless game in playoff history finally ended on a swing by a rookie who started the season in Double A after he was left off the Guardians’ 40-man roster and exposed to a Rule 5 draft last winter that ultimately never occurred.
It was exactly as they had drawn it in January.
They keep going their own way. They beat them RaysSaturday, 1-0 in fifteen innings to advance to the playoffs YankeesIn the American League Division Series. The team that was never invited to the party and wasn’t supposed to be here is now setting the curtains on fire and refusing to leave.
“I’ve never seen a season like this, a team like this, a game like this,” GuardiansCatcher Austin Hedges said. “We’re making people rethink baseball. And it’s so cool.”
The Guardians swept this series by scoring a grand total of three runs — all on home runs. How many of them?
