The best sports stories have a notable nadir, a definable depth from which unexpected awesomeness emerges.
For the 2025 Cleveland Guardians, it came on July 6, when they were one strike away from beating the division-leading Tigers and snapping a nine-game losing streak, only to somehow allow seven runs across the ninth and 10th innings to lose, 7-2, and fall a season-high 15 1/2 games back of Detroit in the American League Central standings.
“A kick in the pants,” manager Stephen Vogt called it. “Gut-wrenching. Heart-wrenching.”
This month alone, the Guardians were 10 1/2 games back of the Tigers going into Sept. 1 and 11 back entering play on Sept. 5. The highest deficit surmounted just within September by an eventual league or division champ came when the Cardinals were 8 1/2 back but took advantage of the Phillies’ “Phold” to win the NL East back in 1964.
They both won the whole darn thing.
The Guardians’ story, meanwhile, is still being written. They have two left against the Tigers on Wednesday and Thursday, then wrap the season at home against the Rangers with three this weekend.
Already, though, the Guards — behind their sensational superstar José Ramírez (who might be an AL MVP favorite if the voting were conducted by financial analysts instead of sportswriters), fantastic offensive finishes for catcher Bo Naylor and recently promoted rookie C.J. Kayfus and a six-man rotation experiment that has yielded ridiculously good results — have etched not only themselves but also this 2025 season into its own beautifully bizarre place in baseball history.
The AL Central now joins each of the other five divisions in having a first-place club squander a lead of 5 1/2 games or more within a season.
According to the Elias Sports Bureau, that had never happened in any of the previous years of the six-division (aka Wild Card) era, which began in 1994.
Detroit is now feeling the pain of the Yankees (eight games) in the AL East, Mets (5 1/2) in the NL East, Cubs (6 1/2) in the NL Central and Astros (seven games) in the AL West. They can only hope to wind up like the Dodgers, who coughed up a nine-game lead to the Padres in the NL West but are nevertheless closing in on a division crown.
The various Wild Card formats naturally lend themselves to late-season lunacy. The more you muddy the waters and lower the bar for October entry, the more you set the stage for September surprises.
In a sport with massive payroll disparities, such surprises are a feature, not a bug.
But that only makes what the Guardians have achieved all the more remarkable.
Because this is an old-school divisional push against a real rival… not to mention the real math.
Even at that aforementioned July 6 juncture, the Guardians’ FanGraphs-calculated odds of reaching the playoffs were at least a lowly-but-not-infinitesimal 5.6%. Their AL Central odds, on the other hand, were just 0.2%.
Through it all, the Guardians had a motto:
“You can win, you must win, you will win.”
No, wait, sorry, that was the motto instilled in the 1914 Braves by their manager George Stallings, who was the son of a Confederate officer (the South didn’t win that one) and known as a hot-tempered taskmaster.
Stallings was also something of a baseball genius. He rallied his Deadball-Era team back from the dead with his inventive use of platoons that eked that miraculous result out of a lineup that, despite the presence of future Hall of Famers Johnny Evers and Rabbit Maranville in the middle infield, was largely made up of the rank-and-file.
The Braves operated around an ironclad rule.
“We had to stay within the law,” Maranville once said, “keep out of jail, and be ready to play.”
The story of the 2025 Guardians is made all the more astonishing by two of the club’s key pitchers being investigated for possibly running afoul of baseball law, with the great closer Emmanuel Clase and the up-and-coming starter Luis Ortiz both placed on non-disciplinary paid leave midseason, while MLB continues an investigation involving sports gambling.
So they sure as heck weren’t buyers.
Going into September, if you had been told this team — with a run differential deep in the red and a team OPS tied with the Pirates for the bottom of the barrel in MLB — would be a contender not just for a division title but possibly for a bye in the Wild Card Series round, you wouldn’t buy that, either.
(Fun fact: The Guardians are trying to join the 1951 New York Giants, 1982 Braves and 2017 Dodgers as the only teams to reach the postseason despite a 10-game losing streak at any point in the year.)
Then again, Cleveland’s been crafting surprise outcomes out of sub-optimal rosters for quite a while now.
Fans get understandably frustrated with the club’s struggle to develop power hitters and an unwillingness to pay for that power externally. Still, since 2013, this franchise has the third-best winning percentage in all of MLB — behind only the Dodgers and Yankees — and has the potential to reach the playoffs for the eighth time in that 13-season span.
That’s a bit of a mathematical miracle, too.
Like the 1914 Braves, the Guardians construct their lineups around the concept of the platoon advantage and rely on a pitching-and-defense foundation. And just as the 1914 Braves took advantage of the New York Giants squandering their giant edge, the Guardians have gotten a lot of help from Detroit’s dizzying decline, which is, of course, a whole ‘nother story.
Cleveland has a chance to craft a story similar to that one in Boston that so enthralled the sport more than a century ago.
Now, it’s the 2025 Guardians making a name for themselves. They’ve turned a “gut-wrenching” season into a “history-making” one.
And the best thing about their story is that it continues.
