José Ramírez supplied the swing, Gavin Williams supplied the strikeouts, and Cleveland supplied the finishing touch Saturday at Progressive Field. The Guardians blanked the White Sox, 2-0, in Game 5 of the American League Division Series, turning an 0-2 series hole into a trip to the ALCS.
Game 5 line
| Club | Runs | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Chicago White Sox | 0 | Lost Game 5 |
| Cleveland Guardians | 2 | Won series, 3-2 |
Cleveland will open the American League Championship Series on Monday at 8 p.m. ET, with Game 1 airing on TBS, truTV, UniMas and HBO Max.
The Guardians became the 11th club to drop the opening two games of a best-of-five postseason matchup and still take the series. It had not happened since the Yankees did it against Cleveland in 2017. Cleveland is also only the fourth team to complete that climb after losing Games 1 and 2 in its own ballpark.
Williams owns the mound
The Game 5 staff total was 21 strikeouts, the highest ever recorded in a nine-inning Major League game, regular season or postseason. Cleveland had already set the previous postseason benchmark earlier in this series, with 19 punchouts in Game 3. The regular-season high had been 20, most recently reached by Milwaukee pitchers against the White Sox on March 26.
Williams accounted for 12 of those strikeouts, matching Charles Nagy’s franchise postseason record from Game 4 of the 1996 ALDS. In a winner-take-all postseason game, only Tarik Skubal’s 13 strikeouts for Detroit in last year’s ALDS Game 5 stand above Williams and Yankees right-hander Cam Schlittler, who struck out 12 in Game 3 of the 2025 AL Wild Card Series.
Williams struck out 24 hitters over the full five-game set, second only to Gerrit Cole’s 25 for Houston in the 2019 ALDS among pitchers in a best-of-five postseason series.
He also added a rare bit of October history. Williams recorded the final out of one elimination game, then started the next one with his club again facing elimination. Only Hank Borowy for the 1945 Cubs and Mordecai Brown for the 1910 Cubs had previously done that in the postseason. Williams is the first of the three whose team won the second game.
Cleveland’s 75 strikeouts for the series rank fourth in postseason history. The three clubs above the Guardians all reached their totals in seven-game series that went the full distance. No other team has piled up more than 64 strikeouts in a best-of-five postseason matchup.
Ramírez finds a pitch to finish it
There was not much margin in a scoreless game, but Ramírez gave Cleveland all it needed with a two-run homer. He called it a “home run pitch,” though it arrived just 0.74 feet off the ground.
That was the lowest pitch Ramírez has ever driven out, counting both regular-season and postseason play. It is also the lowest tracked pitch hit for a postseason homer since pitch tracking began in 2008.
The blast gave Ramírez home runs in consecutive postseason games, something no Cleveland player had done since Francisco Lindor in 2018. More specifically, Ramírez is the first Cleveland player to homer in back-to-back postseason games with elimination hanging over the club in each one.
For a team that spent the week digging out from an early series deficit, the formula looked familiar by Saturday night: its star third baseman delivered the runs, and its pitchers made every White Sox at-bat a long walk uphill.
