Confident Rays quiet Cleveland, return home one win from World Series

CLEVELAND – The Rays are just one win away from the World Series, headed back to Tropicana Field with every ounce of momentum in the ALCS.

Sunday’s 3-1 win in Game 5 felt even more convincing than the low score suggests, giving the Rays a 3-2 lead in the series. If the Rays advance, it would guarantee a first-time champion as neither the Rays nor the Brewers have won a World Series since their organizations entered the league.

We don’t need to look far to find reasons to believe in a Guardians comeback, though, even after an underwhelming performance in Game 5 with just five hits against Drew Rasmussen and the Rays’ bullpen. In the ALDS, the Guardians were down 0-2 to the White Sox before they stormed back with three consecutive wins to advance. The Rays have been the best team in the American League since the midway point of the season, though, and just spent the past two days in Cleveland reminding us exactly why, so the Guardians need to find some of their magic again.

“We need to rebound tomorrow,” Guardians manager Stephen Vogt said. “I know we're going to have a tough matchup tomorrow. But we need to get guys on base and we need to score runs. And we just haven't done that enough over the last two days.”

This was Rays baseball at its very finest. Rasmussen was in complete control of the game, holding the Guardians to one run on four hits over seven innings. What a run Rasmussen is on this postseason. He’s the first pitcher in Rays history with multiple postseason starts of seven-plus innings and one or fewer runs allowed, both of which have come during this run. The last pitcher to pull that off twice before the World Series was Logan Webb with the Giants in 2021.

Good luck trying to get Rasmussen to talk about his own accomplishments, though. The man just wants to win, and knows that if the Rays can pull this off at home in the coming days, he’ll be the one leading this team into the World Series.

“Winning this time of year is the most important thing,” Rasmussen said. “Just doing everything you can to help your team to achieve that. It’s one of those things where every win is so much better and every loss is so much worse.”

The Rays’ defense was elite, too, with shortstop Taylor Walls and second baseman Ben Williamson putting on a clinic up the middle. This series was never going to feature a 10-8 ballgame, and in a battle between two teams built so similarly around pitching and defense, the Rays have been just a bit tighter, just a bit cleaner and just a bit better.

"I think they're just a really unselfish team, and they're willing to kind of take their at-bats away and shoot balls through holes instead of trying to take big swings,” said Guardians starter Parker Messick, who was chased after just two innings. “I think they're a really talented lineup in the way that they have some power and they have some guys that just know how to fight. They're doing a good job of playing their game right now."

Home field won’t be the only advantage waiting for the Rays back in Florida, either, with the first pitch of Game 6 scheduled for 8 p.m. ET Monday. Starter Freddy Peralta will make the start after nine pitches of relief in Game 4 on Saturday, which essentially acted as his “throw day” in between starts. So the Guardians will need to find a plan in a hurry. Peralta was fantastic in his Game 2 start at The Trop, throwing six shutout innings with six strikeouts and throwing the hardest fastball of his career (99.4 mph).

With the potential of a heavy bullpen day on the other side for the Guardians, Vogt and his staff will need to piece it together perfectly. This is an elimination game, though, which means that absolutely every option has to be on the table. But Gavin Williams, their star of the postseason with 33 strikeouts over 16 2/3 innings, would line up one day short of regular rest after last pitching in Game 3 on Thursday.

What we do know is that Williams won’t start, with Vogt saying that’s “not an option.” Beyond that, the Guardians need to empty the tank to try to save their season.

Playing in just their 29th season since entering the league in 1998, the Rays have been to the World Series twice before, but lost to the Dodgers in ‘20 and the Phillies in ‘08. The Guardians have the longest title drought in MLB -- 77 seasons going back to the 1948 World Series -- but they’ve got to pull off something special at Tropicana Field first.

"Knowing our guys, we’re going to flush it, get focused for tomorrow and learn what didn’t go right tonight. We don’t just ignore those," Guardians outfielder Steven Kwan said. "We’ve been in these situations before."

Every single game of this series has brought another swing in momentum, but the Rays have this series exactly where they want it.

"It’s what we work for," said closer Bryan Baker, who picked up another save. "It was a huge, huge couple of games to get us back in that spot. I know the first goal was just to get back to the Trop, and then to be able to go back in this position was exactly what we wanted to do. Super proud of the guys to be able to put us in this spot."

In any best-of-seven series tied 2-2, the Game 5 winner goes on to take the series 46 of 69 times (67%). In series with the current 2-3-2 format that have been tied 2-2, teams winning Game 5 on the road (before going home for Games 6-7) have gone on to take the series 21 of 28 times (75%).