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Cleveland Guardians vs. St. Louis Cardinals, June 29, 2025

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.

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.

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.

It 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.