Cleveland had built one of the more remarkable trends in baseball this season, turning multi-homer games into an almost automatic win, but that streak met its end during Sunday’s series finale against the White Sox. The Guardians actually went deep twice in the loss, with Chase DeLauter and Gabriel Arias both clearing the fence in a back-and-forth affair at Progressive Field, yet Cleveland still walked away on the wrong side of a 7-6 final. Arias delivered the signature blow of the afternoon, a three-run shot measured at 446 feet that stood as the longest home run of his career, while DeLauter’s two-run blast in the third continued his torrid return from the injured list.
None of it was enough to hold off a Chicago lineup that answered with three homers of its own. Reporter Joe Noga of cleveland.com put the streak’s end in context afterward.
“The loss also snapped the Guardians’ 11 game winning streak when hitting multiple home runs. Cleveland is now 15-3 this season when going deep at least twice,” Noga said.
A 15-3 record when hitting multiple home runs says a great deal about how this Cleveland roster has been built to win games. The Guardians have not relied on a single dominant power source, spreading contributions across Arias, DeLauter, Travis Bazzana and others throughout the year, which has made multi-homer nights a fairly regular occurrence rather than a rare event.
Sunday’s loss showed just how unforgiving this current stretch of the schedule has become. Cleveland answered nearly every Chicago punch with one of its own, tying the game as late as the fifth inning on Arias’ towering blast, only for the White Sox to manufacture a go-ahead run in the sixth on a misplayed grounder rather than another home run. Tanner Bibee, fresh off a dominant June, could not find his footing against a Chicago lineup that made him pay for mistakes early, and the bullpen that has carried Cleveland through so many close games this year was not quite enough to hold the line in the middle innings.
The Guardians will look to start a new run of that kind of production when they open a three-game series in Minnesota on Tuesday, hoping the power that has carried them for most of the season shows up again against the Twins.
NEXT: Chase DeLauter Reveals Secret To His Hot Streak
