Ortiz is the best pitcher on this team. Fantastic trade !

Cecconi is a very close second if not the best right now.

Offensively challenged Guardians dazzled by Sonny Gray and Cardinals, 5-0.

In the last 2 games, the Guards have more errors (6) than runs (0).

Guardians’ players meet behind closed doors: It’s no secret what they were talking about

Kayfus is a left handed first baseman who is learning how to play the outfield. How many of those do you want ?

Can he hit major league pitching?

We're still in second place 10 1/2 games behind. Barring a complete collapse, this should be a cakewalk to the division championship for the Tigers. How did this division go from being one of the best to one of the worst in one year? We're still a game and a half behind in the wildcard fight.

I would like to see Nolan Jones get more starts against left handed pitching !! Can't be any worse than the rag tag group of right handed hitters we have right now.

Hasn't anyone checked his records? I just did. Better than the right handed hitters we currently have on the team:

Nolan Jones has demonstrated the ability to hit left-handed pitching, but he is often part of a platoon, meaning he is frequently held out of the lineup against left-handed starters. While he has had success against lefties in the past, including a strong rookie season, his performance against them in the current season is more mixed.

Here's a more detailed look:

Career Performance:

In his career, Jones has a batting average of .259 with 8 home runs and 26 RBIs in 259 plate appearances against left-handed pitchers, according to StatMuse.

Rookie Season Success:

In his rookie season (2023), he batted .314 with 7 homers and 19 RBIs in 130 plate appearances against left-handed pitchers, according to StatMuse.

Current Season (2025):

In the current season, his performance against left-handed pitching is less impressive, but still shows some potential.

Platoon Player:

The Cleveland Guardians often platoon him due to his struggles against right-handed pitching and his generally stronger numbers against lefties.

Room for Improvement:

Despite his past success against lefties, Jones's current struggles against them in 2025, combined with his struggles against righties, suggest he may need to make adjustments to improve his overall consistency.

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Guardians’ Gabriel Arias taken off field on cart after suffering lower leg injury

Updated: Jun. 29, 2025, 3:30 p.m.|Published: Jun. 29, 2025, 12:55 p.m.

By Joe Noga, cleveland.com
CLEVELAND, Ohio — Gabriel Arias left Sunday’s series finale between the Guardians and Cardinals in the third inning after suffering a lower leg injury on a ground ball single by Masyn Winn.

Arias slid to a stop in shallow left field trying to stop a grounder off Winn’s bat with one out. As the ball ticked off his glove, Arias rolled over and grabbed for his left ankle. Replay showed Arias’ cleat getting caught in the turf as his leg bent back awkwardly.

Arias, 25, laid on the turf in obvious pain as manager Stephen Vogt and Guardians trainers rushed to his side. After several moments, a cart was brought out on to the field to take the Cleveland shortstop for further testing.

Arias suffered a left ankle sprain, the club later announced. X-rays were negative.

Daniel Schneemann replaced Arias in the Guardians lineup.

After battling to make the Guardians opening day roster as the starting second baseman, Arias quickly supplanted Brayan Rocchio as the club’s everyday shortstop, putting together a career season at the plate with a .232 batting average, six home runs and 31 RBI in 76 games.

In Saturday’s 9-6 loss to the Cardinals, Arias blasted a two-run home run into the bleachers in left field during Cleveland’s six-run fourth inning.

Since taking over as the everyday shortstop in early May, Arias hit .187 with a .257 on-base percentage while slugging .302. He struck out 55 times in 139 at-bats with 10 walks and nine runs scored.

Manager Stephen Vogt told Andre Knott on the Roku Channel broadcast of Sunday’s game that the team did not immediately know the severity of the injury.

“Its the worst part of this game,” Vogt said. “You never want to see anybody get hurt. ”

In 41 games since being demoted to Triple-A, Rocchio is hitting .252 with seven home runs, 30 RBI and an .837 OPS.

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Guardians’ disastrous June ends with 7-0 loss, historic sweep by Cardinals

Updated: Jun. 29, 2025, 4:00 p.m.|Published: Jun. 29, 2025, 2:56 p.m.

By Joe Noga, cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio — The Guardians played their last game in the month of June on Sunday, and no team in baseball will be happier to see July arrive on the other side of their upcoming off day.

Manager Stephen Vogt’s club closed out a forgettable month with a 7-0 loss to the Cardinals, who completed their first-ever sweep of Cleveland in franchise history at Progressive Field.

Nolan Gorman’s three-run home run off Logan Allen in the first inning provided all the offense St. Louis needed as the Cardinals dealt the Guardians their third shutout loss in four games.

The sweep marked the first for Cleveland at home since August 2022 against Arizona and capped a dismal 9-16 month for Vogt and Co., who have now been swept four times this season.

Cleveland hit just .176 during its 1-5 homestand against the Cardinals and Toronto and averaged 2.9 runs over 25 June games.

Afterward, Vogt admitted that making sure the players in the clubhouse believe that they can turn things around is now a priority, and he is going to keep talking to them and keep pushing them to stay the course.

“As soon as we start changing things, that means we don’t believe,” Vogt said. “We haven’t changed a thing. We believe in this group. We’re going to turn it around.”

Allen settled in after the early homer to deliver his third quality start of the season, working six innings with six strikeouts while allowing six hits and two walks. He has logged five or more innings in each of his last five starts, going 2-3 with a 4.34 ERA in that stretch.

The left-hander escaped trouble in multiple innings, including the third when he struck out Gorman with two runners on base. Vogt said after the first five hitters of the game he thought Allen’s outing was “outstanding.”

“He struggled a little bit with the command in the first and then hung a slider to Gorman,” Vogt said. “But Logan was outstanding, efficient. He turned in six innings for us and kept us in the game long enough for us to give us a chance to come back.”

Allen said getting through six innings consistently has been his goal recently, and trusting his stuff is what has gotten him to that point.

“We executed well and I think at the end of the day it’s about execution,” Allen said. “Anytime you’re doing that, you’re going to be able to go deep in the game. So after the first thing being able to do that helped me for sure.”

Cleveland’s offense continued to struggle, failing to capitalize on a bases-loaded opportunity in the first inning when Angel Martínez grounded out weakly to third. The Guardians managed just three hits against Cardinals starter Matthew Liberatore, who pitched seven scoreless innings with five strikeouts to earn his sixth win.

Cleveland has been held to three hits or fewer in three of its last four games.

The Guardians’ defensive woes also continued as errors by Johnathan Rodríguez and Lane Thomas extended the team’s streak to 10 consecutive games with an error, the longest active stretch in the majors and the first time since 2011 that Cleveland has committed errors in at least 10 straight games.

Adding to Cleveland’s troubles, shortstop Gabriel Arias left the game in the third inning with a left ankle sprain after awkwardly catching his cleat in the turf while pursuing a ground ball. X-rays were negative, but Arias had to be removed from the field on a cart.

Arias will have an MRI on his ankle Monday. Vogt said he hurt for Arias as he went out to check on him after the play.

“You don’t want to see anybody get hurt,” Vogt said. “It’s just scary when you see somebody in that much pain, you don’t know what it could be. Hopefully we get some decent news tomorrow. But you just feel for him.”

Guardians relievers also had a rough afternoon as Hunter Gaddis surrendered a two-run homer to Victor Scott II in the seventh inning, and the Cardinals added two more runs in the eighth against Tim Herrin.

The loss was Cleveland’s sixth shutout defeat in June and ninth overall this season. Despite the troubling trend, catcher Austin Hedges said the Guardians are not about to give up midway through the campaign.

“We didn’t sign up to play 80 games, we signed up to play 162,” Hedges said. “When September’s over, that’s when we’ll judge our season.”

Next
The Guardians are off Monday before opening a three-game series in Chicago against the Cubs. Right-hander Gavin Williams (5-3, 3.68) will start the opener for Cleveland while lefty and ex-Guardians starter Matthew Boyd (7-3, 2.65) takes the mound for the Cubs.

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Sprained ankle. No break. X rays negative.

Infield not the same without Rocchio and Gimenez
Ramirez, Rocchio, Gimenez, and Santana best defensive team in baseball

11.5 & 2.5

Number of games behind in the division; Number of games behind in the wild card chase.
We lost 2 games each in the division & in the wild chase during this weekend's debacle.

This is getting serious. Hate to say it, but another run like this past week, we miss out on the playoff experience.

Watched the Tigers and Tarek last night. Talk about a dominant force.
Don't know if anyone else watched, but the Tiger fans are in playoff mode. Packed house. Electricity was, well, electric.

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Guardians at a crossroads: Wild card chase or rebuild as the MLB trade deadline approaches?

Updated: Jun. 30, 2025, 6:08 p.m.|Published: Jun. 30, 2025, 5:21 p.m.

By Paul Hoynes, cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Baseball teams rarely want to be caught in the middle. It is never a good thing to be half good, half bad and going nowhere.

The Guardians, after being swept by the Cardinals in a three-game series over the weekend, are leaning over the halfway point of the season at 40-42.

This year they’ve never been more than eight games over .500 nor three games below breakeven.

Their longest winning streak has been five games. Their longest losing streak has been five games. They are two slices of white bread with bologna and yellow mustard in between.

[ LOVE 2 SLICES OF WHITE BREAD WITH BOLOGNA AND YELLOW MUSTARD IN BETWEEN !! ]

Mediocrity has defined their season so far. At this moment, the one thing they excel at is bad baseball.

The Guardians’ players held a team meeting after Friday’s 5-0 loss to the Cardinals to discuss the matter.

The 5-0 loss came on the heels of a 6-0 loss to the Blue Jays in which José Ramírez, the face of the franchise, was knocked out of the game after taking a 95 mph fastball to the right forearm, and first baseman Kyle Manzardo made three errors in one inning.

In that two-game stretch, the Guardians committed six errors, managed three hits and scored no runs. So, there was plenty to discuss.

After clearing the air, the Guardians lost to the Cardinals, 9-6, on Saturday and 7-0 on Sunday. In Saturday’s game they scored six runs in the fourth inning for a 6-1 lead and still lost.

[ If you're going to talk the talk, you better come out and walk the walk. ]

The Guardians pride themselves on doing the hardest thing in baseball — putting a playoff-caliber team on the field every year on a fixed income. They are good at it.

In the last 13 years, they have been to the postseason seven times and had nine winning seasons. They’ve won five American League Central titles and one AL pennant, losing the World Series to the Cubs in seven games in 2016.

While other small-market teams have built teams geared toward one or two years of championship play, only to tear it down because of increasing salaries and the approach of free agency, the Guardians have consistently tried to put a quality product on the field.

t crystallized with the hiring of manager Terry Francona in 2013 and carried through 2024 when Stephen Vogt took over as manager and led the Guardians to a division title and a trip to the AL Championship Series.

Not every one of the past 13 seasons has been perfect. In 2023, when Francona stepped down as manager, they went 76-86. They were 81-80 in 2015 and 80-82 in 2021.

This might be one of those years. It certainly feels like it after the Guardians went 9-16 in June, while finishing last among MLB’s 30 teams with 72 runs (2.9 runs per game) and a .206 batting average.

It may remind some Cleveland fans of when Zombie Baseball emerged from the crypt in August of 2012. The Walking Dead Indians, under Manny Acta, went 5-24, but still managed to score more than three runs per game (3.31 to be exact). That shines an even dimmer light on the Guardians’ performance this June.

So where does Cleveland’s front office go from here? They trail the first-place Tigers by 11 1/2 games in the Central. They were 2 1/2 games out of the third and final wild card spot after Sunday’s loss to the Cardinals.

The Guardians are 3-1 against the Tigers this year, but do they have a realistic chance of running them down? There are still 80 games left in the season, and a lot of things can happen in that many games. A realist, however, could point to Cleveland’s first 82 games as evidence that the offense is incapable of the kind of turnaround necessary to make the Tigers sweat.

That leaves Chris Antonetti, Mike Chernoff and the rest of the decision makers in the front office with the uneasy task of deciding how much do they buy into Cleveland’s wild card chances.

When the Guardians made the postseason as a wild card team in 2013, they had to win the last 10 games of the season to earn one of the only two wild card spots at the time. After all that drama, they lost the single-game elimination to Tampa Bay.

Life is easier now for wild card teams. Each league has three wild cards, and they get to play a best-of-three series. Still, what caliber of player are the Guardians willing to take on or trade for a throw or two of the wild-card dice?

Should the answer be none, they can try and trade the few veterans they have for future help, while promoting prospects such as Chase DeLauter and C.J. Kayfus to play out the season.

Whichever path they take, it seems like an opportunity missed for a team that went five games with the Yankees in the ALCS last year before going home for the season.

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Guardians’ SS Gabriel Arias headed to injured list after MRI on left ankle

Published: Jun. 30, 2025, 8:03 p.m.

By Paul Hoynes, cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio — The Guardians are expected to have a new shortstop in the lineup when they open a three-game series against the Cubs on Tuesday night at Wrigley Field.

Gabriel Arias will be placed on the injured list Tuesday with a lateral sprain of his left ankle after receiving an MRI on Monda

Arias, who can play all over the diamond, injured his ankle in the third inning Sunday sliding to make a stop of a hit by Masyn Winn of the Cardinals in the third inning.

Arias was carted off the field and replaced by Daniel Schneemann. The Guardians have not announced who will replace Arias, but a logical choice would be Brayan Rocchio, who opened the season as the Guardians’ shortstop, but eventually lost his job to Arias.

Rocchio is hitting .252 (40 for 159) with seven homers and 30 RBI at Triple-A Columb us. He has a .837 OPS (onbase percentage + slugging percentage) for the Clippers.

When he was optioned to Columbus, Rocchio was batting .165 (15 for 91) with seven homers and 30 RBI with the Guardians. He had 21 strikeouts, five walks and a .433 OPS.

Arias heads to the IL during his most consistent season in the big leagues. He’s hitting .231 (59 for 255) with 17 doubles, six homers and 31 RBI, while playing quality defense.

When the season opened, Arias, out of options, was the starting second baseman. When Rocchio was optioned, he started playing shortstop regularly on May 9.

If Rocchio isn’t recalled, the Guardians could add outfielders Chase DeLauter or C.J. Kayfus from Columbus because Schneemann and Angel Martinez can play shortstop.

The Guardians, after going 9-16 in June while averaging 2.9 runs per game, are looking for offense.

Infielder Milan Tolentino, who leads Columbus with 13 home runs, could be a candidate as well.

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The schedule offers little relief. After Monday’s off day, the Guardians go to Chicago to play the NL Central-leading Cubs in a three-game series. The Cubs are 25-15 at Wrigley Field, while the Guards are 20-22 on the road.

Then it’s back to Progressive Field for a brief three-game series with the AL Central-leading Tigers.

After Sunday’s loss, the second-place Guardians trailed Detroit by a season-high 11 1/2 games. A double-digit deficit means double trouble, especially with July right around the corner.

Then there’s a six-game trip before the All-Star Game against Houston and the White Sox. Houston, leading the AL West by 6 1/2 games, has won eight of its last 10 games against the Guardians.

By the time the Guardians reach the South Side of Chicago on July 12, they might be floundering as much as the White Sox.

One thing is clear, the time for talking is over. Everybody already knows what the Guardians’ problems are. All they have to do is hit the ball, catch the ball and pitch the ball a lot better than they’ve been doing.

It’s an easy thing to write, a much harder thing to actually do.

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