21 Strikeouts and a Comeback: How Cleveland's Pitchers Rewrote the Record Book

Cleveland did not just come back from 0-2 against the White Sox. It did it by setting a strikeout record, breaking that record three days later and finishing the series with one of the best pitching performances in the history of the Division Series format.

The Guardians won the American League Division Series 3-2 after losing the first two games at home. They are only the 11th team to lose the first two games of a best-of-five postseason series and come back to win, according to MLB.com, and the first since the 2017 Yankees did it against Cleveland. They are the fourth team to do it after losing the first two at home.

The way they did it is worth a closer look, because it was not luck. It was a pitching staff that took the best offense in the American League and made it miss, again and again, for three straight games.

Game 3: The First Record

The series started badly. Chicago won Game 1 3-0 and Game 2 4-3, both at Progressive Field. Cleveland scored three runs in those two games.

Game 3 was on Wednesday, Oct. 7, in Chicago in front of 40,590 fans. Cleveland had no margin left. Manager Stephen Vogt started Daniel Espino as an opener, and Kyle Teel's RBI double put the White Sox ahead 1-0 in the first. Espino got two outs before Vogt went to Foster Griffin.

Griffin changed the game. He came in with two runners on, struck out Tristan Peters looking to strand them and kept going. He struck out seven batters in 2 2/3 innings, a franchise record for a reliever in the postseason. His sweeper and fastball produced five of the seven.

Behind him came Shawn Armstrong, Joey Cantillo, Hunter Gaddis, Tim Herrin and Cade Smith. Smith struck out five in two innings to finish it. Cleveland's pitchers combined for 19 strikeouts, a record for a nine-inning postseason game at the time.

The offense finally showed up too. Jo Adell hit a bases-clearing triple in the third inning. In the eighth, with two outs and two on, José Ramírez lined an 0-2 curveball from David Sandlin into left for a two-run triple. It was the first time Cleveland had hit two triples in a postseason game. The Guardians won 9-3 and sent the series to Game 4.

Cleveland won Game 4 9-5, also in Chicago, on Thursday, Oct. 8. Gavin Williams recorded the final out to save it.

Game 5: Twenty-One Strikeouts

Two days later, Williams asked for the ball in Game 5 at Progressive Field. He had already pitched in Game 4. He started anyway.

He needed seven pitches to get through the first inning. He struck out the side in the second and again in the fifth. He did not allow a hit until Kyle Teel's two-out single in the sixth. He finished with 5 2/3 innings, one hit, no runs, two walks and 12 strikeouts.

Those 12 strikeouts tied the Cleveland record for a postseason game, set by Charles Nagy in Game 4 of the 1996 ALDS. They also tied the Yankees' Cam Schlittler, from the 2025 Wild Card Series, for the second-most strikeouts in a winner-take-all postseason game. Only Tarik Skubal's 13 for Detroit in Game 5 of the 2025 ALDS is higher.

Erik Sabrowski came in with the bases loaded and struck out Munetaka Murakami to end the threat. Gaddis struck out four in 1 1/3 innings. Smith struck out four more in 1 2/3 innings to get the save.

The offense needed only one swing. In the fourth inning, Ramírez hit a two-run homer off Sean Burke on a pitch just above home plate. That was the only scoring of the night. Cleveland won 2-0.

Cleveland's pitchers struck out 21 batters. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, that is the most in any game of nine innings or fewer in Major League history, regular season or postseason. The previous postseason record was the 19 that Cleveland had set in Game 3. The previous regular-season record was 20, done several times, most recently by Milwaukee's pitchers on March 26, also against the White Sox.

Burke took the loss. He gave up the one swing that mattered, and in a game where the other side strikes out 21 times, one swing was enough. Two runs held up for nine innings because Chicago never found a way to string hits together. Every time a runner reached, the next strikeout seemed to follow, and the inning ended before the White Sox could build anything.

The White Sox finished with three hits. They put only nine balls in play all night.

Ramírez was the other constant. In the three elimination games, the Guardians' best hitter delivered the two-run triple that put Game 3 away and the two-run homer that won Game 5. With a staff keeping the White Sox quiet, Cleveland's offense needed one star to come through at the right time. Ramírez did it twice.

Cade Smith deserves a mention too. He struck out five in two innings to close Game 3 and four in 1 2/3 innings to save Game 5. That is nine strikeouts in 3 2/3 innings across two elimination games, with no hits allowed in either outing. Most of the attention went to Williams, but Smith finished both of the games that kept the season alive.

Why the Numbers Matter

The series totals are where the performance really stands out. Cleveland's staff struck out 75 batters in five games. That is the fourth-most strikeouts in any postseason series in history, and the three teams ahead of the Guardians all did it in best-of-seven series that went the full seven games. Cleveland's 75 were 11 more than any other team has ever recorded in a best-of-five series.

Williams finished the series with 24 strikeouts. That is the second-most by any pitcher in a best-of-five series, one behind Gerrit Cole's 25 for Houston in the 2019 ALDS.

He also joined a very short list. According to Elias, Williams is the third pitcher in postseason history to record the final out of one game and then start the next, with his team facing elimination in both. The other two are Hank Borowy for the Cubs in Games 6 and 7 of the 1945 World Series and Mordecai Brown for the Cubs in Games 4 and 5 of the 1910 World Series. Williams is the only one of the three whose team won the second game.

All of that came against a lineup that was built to avoid exactly this. The White Sox led the American League with 776 runs and 589 walks during the regular season. They ranked third in the league in home runs with 211 and third in OPS at .726. They swept Houston in the Wild Card round. This was a patient, powerful offense, and Cleveland took the patience away.

It is also worth remembering how close this came to ending early. Cleveland scored three runs in the first two games, both at home. A team that loses twice at home in a best-of-five usually goes home for the winter. Ten teams had done what Cleveland did before this October, across decades of Division Series play. That is a small club.

There is a lesson in how Cleveland got there. The Guardians did not win Game 3 with one ace. They won it with an opener and six relievers, and Griffin gave them the best relief outing in franchise postseason history. Then they won Game 5 with a starter on two days of rest and four relievers who each did their job. The common thread was strikeouts, and the ability to get them from almost anyone on the staff.

That depth is the reason the comeback was possible. When a team is down 0-2 in a best-of-five, it cannot afford a single bad inning from the bullpen. Cleveland did not have one in the three elimination games. Chicago scored three runs in Game 3, five in Game 4 and none in Game 5, and the last two of those games came with the White Sox needing only one win to advance.

For Chicago, the loss stings. The White Sox are now 0-2 all-time in series-deciding playoff games, after also losing Game 3 in Oakland in 2020. Colson Montgomery said afterward that everybody assumed the series would go the distance, and it did. The White Sox just could not put the ball in play when it counted.

For Cleveland, the series will be remembered for a long time. The franchise has had great pitching teams before. It has never had a stretch quite like this one. The staff broke a strikeout record and then broke its own record three days later, and Williams saved one elimination game and won the next.

The Guardians earned their place in the American League Championship Series the hard way. The numbers they put up to get there will be in the record books regardless of what comes next. Strikeout records tend to last, and this one came in the biggest game of their season.

Sports Unfiltered.