Josh Naylor, Guardians head-butt way into AL Central race against Twins - The Athletic

2022-06-30 14:32:27 By : Mr. Kevin Lee

CLEVELAND — A Josh Naylor-fueled celebration resembles the mosh pit at a heavy metal concert.

You’re a little scared. Your heart rate soars. You’re at risk of an injury. The intensity of the surrounding chaos is enough to swallow you whole.

As Naylor neared first base, the decisive baseball disappearing onto the home run porch in left field, he flung his bat toward Lake Erie. After he rounded third, he launched his helmet into the air, nearly denting the moon.

He implored his teammates to take it easy with the home-plate huddle out of fear for his right leg, which was surgically repaired one year ago after a gruesome collision in a game against these same Twins. There’s nothing calm or relaxed about a Naylor bash, though.

As he strutted back toward the home dugout, he unleashed one of his patented diatribes, littered with language that requires so many clicks of the censor button that it sounds like a semitruck stuck in reverse.

Naylor tore off his jersey and then promptly head-butted his manager, who sported a helmet because he has learned his lesson about Naylor’s heroics-driven mayhem. To cap his theatrics, Naylor marched through an empty dugout, smacking himself in the head and flexing his arms and delivering primal shouts to no one in particular.

Josh Naylor walk-offs are unlike anything you've ever seen before.#ForTheLand | #GuardiWins pic.twitter.com/d8DK5GVHCF

— Cleveland Guardians (@CleGuardians) June 30, 2022

Guardians manager Terry Francona joked after the game that he needed to ice his neck. Naylor, sitting in the back of the press interview room during the manager’s session — by that point having morphed from a crazed fastball-crusher with enough energy to fuel a small village into a soft-spoken, introspective slugger — embraced his manager and apologized for the heat-of-the-moment noggin-knocking.

This probably won’t come as a surprise, given his emotion and fervor, but Naylor had no intention of settling for some game-tying bloop hit. It was walk-off homer or bust, bedlam or bummer.

“I just tried to hit a homer, to be honest,” Naylor said. “I was just trying to end the game. I didn’t want to hit a single. I wanted to end it. I just wanted to win.”

Naylor was sitting on a changeup throughout the at-bat, but Jharel Cotton kept tossing him fastballs. So Naylor adjusted.

It marked Cleveland’s first home run since Friday, snapping a power outage that lasted 58 innings. It rescued the club from yet another defeat during a brutal homestand and came against the team the Guardians are chasing in the division.

For the fourth time in the past nine days, the Guardiac Kids tormented the Twins bullpen. For as valuable as José Ramírez has been to Cleveland this season, Minnesota reliever Emilio Pagán might be even more pivotal to the Guardians’ fortunes. Per ESPN Stats & Info, Cleveland has three victories this season when trailing by three or more runs in the ninth; the league’s other 29 teams have combined for five such wins. For all their faults — and plenty have surfaced in the past week — the Twins certainly aren’t daunted by a deficit.

A team staffer handed Naylor the baseball after the game, a keepsake to document his first career walk-off and the madness that followed. Naylor stared at it for a second and then stuffed it in his right shorts pocket, shrugging when asked if he wanted it detailed with fancy designs or information about the game.

“It’s just a baseball,” he said.

Well, that baseball inched Cleveland closer to first place in the American League Central and ignited an intense celebration that might have the manager and others reaching for aspirin in the morning.

For the fourth time in nine days, the Twins find themselves in the same position.

After Cleveland completed its stunning, four-run comeback Wednesday night, Pagán and Twins manager Rocco Baldelli once again had to answer questions about another outing in which the reliever didn’t get it done. Though Pagán didn’t get credited with the loss or even a blown save, his fingerprints once again were all over a gut-punch loss — the same as they were Tuesday, as well as last Tuesday and Wednesday.

No matter the final score Thursday, the Twins will head back to Minneapolis in first place in the division. But they’ll do so knowing they’ve missed multiple opportunities to create breathing room in the standings while also giving their closest competitor four double-espresso pick-me-ups.

“When you have one of them, it’s obviously frustrating,” Baldelli said. “When you have a few of them, you’ve really got to make sure you don’t get too inside your own head. You can get emotional, but not overly emotional or spastic or anything like that. We have a game just about every day coming up for a little while. We’re doing a lot right in these games. We’re putting ourselves in a really good spot. We’ve got to find a way to finish these games out.”

The Twins thought they were in a position to close it out Wednesday.

They’d come back from three runs down against Cal Quantrill and stuck around long enough to take a three-run lead in the top of the 10th on Carlos Correa’s pinch hit, RBI single and Max Kepler’s two-run homer. But to get there, they had already exhausted the most effective part of their bullpen, as Caleb Thielbar and Griffin Jax each pitched a scoreless inning and Jhoan Duran completed two.

Carlos Correa gives the Twins a 4-3 lead in the 10th!!#MNTwins pic.twitter.com/ukouzeIDOK

— Bally Sports North (@BallySportsNOR) June 30, 2022

With Pagán, Cotton, Tyler Duffey and Tyler Thornburg remaining, Baldelli opted for Pagán, who blew a three-run lead last Wednesday.

Though his Fielding Independent Pitching has long suggested Pagán was due for a course correction this season, the reliever carried a 2.45 ERA through June 13. Just 16 days later, Pagán’s ERA has ballooned to 5.62.

After he recorded the first out of the 10th on a groundout, Pagán lost a seven-pitch battle to Steven Kwan, who walked. Three pitches later, Pagán left a split-fingered fastball up and Amed Rosario doubled into the left-field corner, which ended the pitcher’s night.

“(The walk) gives them life,” Pagán said. “I threw a lot of pitches in the zone that at-bat, and (Kwan) just didn’t put it in play. He’s a guy where as great as he is, I want him to put it in play because he doesn’t do a ton of damage. He can find holes and be a headache during the at-bat, but I’m trying to get him to put it in play, and foul ball, foul ball, foul ball, foul ball, close take. That’s the game.

“I’m pretty angry. Disappointed. Letting the team down — that’s probably about as simple as I can put it.”

He was happy to be trusted with the lead. He’d shaken off the Ryan Jeffers passed ball that allowed a run to score and the tying run to reach third base. He’d retired Ramírez on a broken-bat flyout.

And then Naylor muscled one out the opposite way and head-butted his way into the hearts of Cleveland fans everywhere.

“Honestly, I don’t even know how,” Cotton said. “First, I thought it was a fly ball to Nick Gordon, but it just kept going back and back. I don’t know how he kept it fair, to be honest.

“Just one pitch. One pitch messed up the entire game. … I’m still stoked (Baldelli) put me in that position. I feel like I could have succeeded in that role, but unfortunately, it didn’t happen. I’ve just got to get back at it (Thursday) and move forward.”

The Twins have proved capable of bouncing back many times this season. Thursday, they’ll have to do it once again.

Meisel: The Twins hold a two-game lead in the AL Central, though the Guardians have one fewer loss this season since Mother Nature wreaked havoc on the club’s April and May itinerary. Entering this season, contention was more of a hope and a prayer for Cleveland than any sort of certainty. And yet, thanks to an uninspiring division …

Hayes: There’s definitely some truth to that. The Central just isn’t very good. Even if the Twins win the series, they have to know they’ve let the Guardians hang around and breathed life into their division hopes.

Meisel: On Thursday afternoon, these teams will play the final game in this stretch of eight encounters in 10 days. The series has exceeded the hype. (Was there hype?)

Hayes: I’m not sure there should have been a lot of hype given how much of the season is left. The Twins have spent this entire stretch reminding everyone they’re not looking at the standings. A week ago these teams were tied, and the Twins are back in the lead again. Remember when Cleveland took three of four at Target Field in August 2019? The Twins said the same things then — there was too much schedule left to worry about one series. But the way they’ve lost these games — had they buttoned down all four, they could be sitting on a 10-game lead — certainly adds an element.

Meisel: Well, Naylor did say this: “We’re not really worried about anyone in first place, second place. We don’t really care, to be honest. We’re just gonna fight every day, we’re gonna play hard every day, no matter who we’re facing. Whether it’s the Twins, the Yankees next, Boston, we don’t really care. We want to play our game, play hard and hopefully celebrate after.”

Emphasis on the “celebrate” part.

Hayes: He definitely owns the postgame celebration. It feels like the on-field version of “Party at Napoli’s.” The one aspect the Twins are probably counting on to get them through is that this won’t be the makeup of their bullpen in a month. This is a team that went all in when it signed Correa, and addressing the bullpen is high on the Twins’ list. But it has to be concerning that they’ve potentially created a monster and given the Guardians life.

(Photo: David Richard / USA Today)