The numbers behind Cleveland’s second-half collapse have been well documented through the lens of batting average and OPS with runners in scoring position, but The Athletic’s Zack Meisel dug into a different layer of the problem, one that gets at the heart of just how poorly the Guardians have executed in the most basic situational moments of the game. Rather than focusing purely on hits, Meisel zeroed in on baserunner advancement itself, and the picture that emerged places Cleveland near the bottom of the entire league in the exact situations a contending team needs to convert.
Meisel laid out two specific situational statistics that crystallize the depth of Cleveland’s issue.
“In plate appearances with a runner on third and less than two outs, a Cleveland runner has scored 45.0 percent of the time. Only the Cincinnati Reds have fared worse. In plate appearances with a runner on second and no outs, a Cleveland runner has advanced 42.1 percent of the time, the worst rate in the league,” Meisel wrote.
Meisel detailed that in plate appearances with a runner on third base and fewer than two outs, a Cleveland runner has scored just 45 percent of the time, a figure that ranks better than only the Reds across all of baseball. He found an equally troubling number in a related situation, noting that with a runner on second base and no outs, Cleveland has advanced that runner just 42.1 percent of the time, the single worst rate in the entire league. Those numbers move beyond simple hitting struggles and point to fundamental issues in the kind of productive outs, sacrifice flies, ground balls to the right side, that contending teams typically rely on to manufacture runs even when the bat is not delivering a clean hit.
That kind of situational inefficiency helps explain why Cleveland has repeatedly generated traffic on the bases throughout its recent skid without turning that traffic into runs on the scoreboard. It also adds context to comments from both Stephen Vogt and Chase DeLauter in recent days, as both have pointed to a mental approach in scoring position situations as a central issue, an explanation that lines up directly with numbers showing the Guardians are failing to advance runners even without needing a base hit to do it.
If Cleveland can start converting these basic advancement opportunities at a league average rate, the underlying talent on this roster still gives the Guardians a real path back into the thick of the postseason picture.
NEXT: Guardians Player Is Riding An 8 Game Tear Right Now
