While the Guardians have looked strong to start the season, their current pitching situation may not allow for continuous success.

If you correctly predicted that the Cleveland Guardians would have the best record in the American League on April 26, it might be time to buy that lottery ticket you’ve been eyeing at the checkout counter. Just six months removed from a 76-win season, the Guardians are 18-7, have lost only one series all season and are back to being the scrappiest, peskiest team in all of Major League Baseball.

After another off-season of minimal spending, breaking camp with no experienced center fielders and losing their ace just two starts into his season, it’s truly remarkable how well the Guardians have dealt with adversity. But this hot start hasn’t come without exposing some flaws in the way this roster is constructed. And unfortunately for these Guards, one of those flaws appears fatal.

Make no mistake, this is a significantly better baseball team than the 2023 Guardians, who were a disappointment in nearly every way. But ever since that team traded Aaron Civale to the Tampa Bay Rays, the starting pitching depth at the big league level has been insufficient. And at some point this season, that lack of depth will be exposed.

Guardians don’t have enough starting pitching

There are occasionally instances in baseball where the uniform a player wears elicits trust from the baseball community regardless of who the players are. And over the years, starting pitchers from the Guardians have gained that trust, because the next talented young player always seems to be coming.

Even last season, in spite of key injuries and the Civale trade, Cleveland ranked ninth in starting pitcher ERA at the end of the year.

In 2024, though, the Guardians have already dipped to 12th in that same metric despite the team’s hot stretch. And that still weighs the two phenomenal starts Shane Bieber had before suffering his season-ending injury fairly heavily. In starting pitcher FIP, meanwhile, which measures more realistic expectations for performance, the Guardians rank 26th. Regression seems all but inevitable in the weeks to come.

The five names making up the rotation right now don’t amount to a championship-caliber operation. Tanner Bibee, Triston McKenzie, Logan Allen, Ben Lively and Carlos Carrasco is a tandem very few teams would trade for if given the choice and the Guardians are counting on their meticulous advanced scouting department to prepare those five to perform above expectations.

Tanner Bibee being asked to do too much

Ken Blaze-USA TODAY Sports
Production in any rotation starts at the top and because Bibee was so good in 2023, picking up a second-place AL Rookie of the Year finish, the 25-year-old is being asked to pick up the slack for the injured Bieber. Unfortunately, however, it doesn’t look as though Bibee came into this season ready for an encore. His stuff is diminished, he’s getting hit much harder and the Guardians don’t know what to expect from him in a full 30+ start workload.

The main issue with Bibee this season is that his four-seam fastball, which has lost about a mile per hour on average from a season ago, is getting tattooed. With a fairly typical arsenal for a right-handed starter, Bibee relies on the fastball over 40% of the time, though that number has already shrank about 5% from his 2023 usage. The batting average against it has jumped from .243 to .429 and the expected stats support the dip in effectiveness.

On the whole, Bibee has a 4.44 ERA, 5.53 xERA and 1.60 WHIP. He still has solid strikeout numbers and the excellent results from a season ago would indicate he’s still capable of shaving those stats down, but he’s far from the ace the Guardians were oping he would be. And that puts a ton of pressure on the remained of the group to carry more weight than they’ve proven to be capable of shouldering based on experience.

Uncertainty across the board

Behind Bibee, Triston McKenzie looks to be the best bet to be the number two, because in 2022, that’s exactly what he was. But coming off an elbow sprain and shoulder strain that limited him to 16 starts last season, McKenzie has lost his control almost entirely. He leads the AL with 17 walks despite throwing just 22 innings thus far.

Logan Allen, meanwhile, is still trying to establish himself as a quality major league starter. His rookie debut was strong, with a 3.81 ERA in 24 starts, but that ERA has jumped to 5.06 in five starts in year two. It’s good to have youth at the back end of a rotation, but Allen is being asked to be a stabilizer who goes deep into games, not a young arm with a long leash to figure it out.

Ben Lively has looked the best of the five starters so far, but he’s also only made two starts, both against the ailing Boston Red Sox without Rafael Devers in the lineup. Meanwhile Lively has never made more than 15 starts in a single season, and that was all the way back in 2017 with the Philadelphia Phillies. So perhaps the Guardians have unlocked something for Lively in year eight, but a larger sample is needed.

And finally, there’s Carlos Carrasco, who is a great redemption story in his return to Cleveland at the age of 37. But Cookie was one of the worst starting pitchers in the league in 2023 and although he’s battling in 2024, he’s still at -0.1 bWAR through his first five starts.

Guardians living on borrowed time

So although the overall success of the Guardians has been eye-opening across the league, it’s clear the rotation won’t allow them to keep winning at this torrid pace. They may have done enough already to remain in the playoff picture all summer and perhaps they can even win the AL Central, but going into a playoff series with the names Cleveland currently has is a sketchy proposition at best.

And unfortunately, if history is any guidebook, the Guardians won’t be willing to make a big splash at the trade deadline in order to remedy their shortcomings. If anything, they’ll be aggressive in trading away anyone they think they can get value for, as they did with Civale a season ago.

That could easily find them their next Josh Naylor or Andrés Giménez, but in terms of winning now, it doesn’t bring them any closer to playoff glory.