The Cleveland Guardians leveled their record to 19-19 after beating the Kansas City Royals on Wednesday in the third game of their series. That’s good enough for first place in the AL Central.
The fact that a team playing .500 ball leads the division well into May isn’t as surprising as the gap between the leaders and the last-place team, the Minnesota Twins: two and a half games.
Wait, what? Yes, that’s right: the Guardians, the Tigers, the Royals, the White Sox, and the Twins are separated by just 2.5 games as of Thursday morning.
Chicago, one of MLB’s worst squads last year, currently has a 17-20 record and a not-so-horrible -16 run differential. They have been much, much better than anticipated, which actually makes the outlook of the division much harder to predict.
Paul Hoynes of Cleveland.com believes it will be another close race and sees all five teams in a similar tier. It may be too early to tell if the White Sox are for real and if the rest of the organizations will be in contention all year, but it sure seems like they are all close in talent level and depth.
“It’s shaping up to be another down-to-the-wire race here. Detroit, Cleveland, Kansas City, the White Sox, the Twins are all kind of in the same box. There’s not a dominant team there,” Hoynes said in the Cleveland Baseball Talk Podcast.
Joe Noga said that “every team in the division has its own type of flaw and it’s a matter of who’s going to overcome those little obstacles to be on top at the end of the year.”
This sounds like a perfect storm for the Guardians to take advantage of and finally show some aggression. They have done so to this point, promoting top prospect Travis Bazzana before May. They do need to make sure they are in a good position to win every game, and judging by some of their recent decisions, such as playing Bo Naylor behind the plate despite some ugly struggles, that hasn’t always been the case.
If the Guardians are willing to make some promotions (Cooper Ingle, for example, deserves a shot) and trade some of their prospect for impact players before the deadline, a third straight division title is a concrete possibility.
The intention, however, is to reach further instances in the postseason.
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