After every win, the Cleveland Guardians dash from the dugout to the clubhouse, where their victory ceremony awaits.
Their backup catcher, 32-year-old Austin Hedges, selects a player of the game, makes a short speech and presents him with a World Wrestling Entertainment–branded championship belt.
“It’s not democratic,” says reliever Eli Morgan. “It’s all Hedges. It’s an oligarchy? I don’t know how that stuff works, but it’s all on him. He picks really well.”
The tradition dates to Opening Day this year, and every win—92 of them in the regular season, and now, after an epic American League Championship Series Game 3, four so far this October—follows the same script: Hedges selects the player, makes the speech and presents him with the belt.
Except on Thursday.
Game 3, a rollicking, seesawing, heart-stopping, 10-inning, 7–5 victory over the New York Yankees to give the Guardians their first win of the series, featured an astounding four late-inning, game-changing home runs, each walloped off one of the game’s best relievers. It might have set the record for the number of times “Oh my God” has been uttered at Progressive Field. It sent thousands of the sellout crowd of 32,531 out onto Ontario Street in the eighth when it seemed hope was lost—and created thousands of liars who will always have stayed until the end.
It was too big for one championship belt. So the Guardians handed out two.
Who could choose between moments? Jhonkensy Noel’s two-out, pinch-hit, two-run blast to tie the game in the bottom of the ninth? Or David Fry’s two-out, two-run shot to win it in the bottom of the 10th? How could you choose even between the headlines: CHRISTMAS COMES EARLY; FRY COOKS THE YANKEES?
They couldn’t. When WWE was in town in August for SummerSlam, their staffers gave the Guardians clubhouse staff a second championship belt. On Thursday, they offered it to Hedges, who gathered the group and reminded them that this was exactly who Noel and Fry had been all year. Hedges handed them each a belt.
“And then we started yelling and screaming,” he says.
Progressive Field had been near-silent not an hour earlier, when the Guardians sent superstar closer Emmanuel Clase to the mound with a 3–1 lead and watched him do something they could not have fathomed before this month: blow it. By ERA+, Clase’s 2024 was the second best by a pitcher with at least 50 innings in history. He baffles hitters with a 100-mph cutter and an even more devastating slider. He gave up five runs all season. He coughed up two leads in the American League Division Series against the Detroit Tigers, but his teammates knew those were aberrations.
“You just hand him the ball, and we don’t even watch the game,” Fry says. “I feel like we are chatting up because we know the game is over.”
Clase entered with two outs and a runner on first. Yankees center fielder Aaron Judge, who will almost certainly win the American League Most Valuable Player award next month but was 3-for-October, got four straight 99-mph cutters. He fouled off the first one. He swung through the second. He took the third for a ball. He lined the fourth one just over the wall in right field. Tie game.
“I think there’s one person that could hit that pitch off Emmanuel Clase out of the yard, and he did,” Vogt says. “As a baseball fan, it was really cool. As the opposing manager, it was not. But what a fun baseball game for two really good teams.”
The Yankees spilled out of the dugout like a pile of puppies, flinging themselves over the rail and climbing all over one another. They eventually wandered back inside, but they did not stay there long: DH Giancarlo Stanton, whose postseason has been the opposite of Judge’s, produced the same result, this time on a 1–2 slider.
Judge’s was the third homer the right-handed Clase had allowed to a righty on a cutter all year; Stanton’s was the first to a righty on a slider.
The Guardians were so out of ideas that they challenged the call that Stanton had touched first base. (He had.) Fans began to stream out. The Yankees’ dugout continued to rock. The Guardians’ reeled.
“We were, like, obviously, shook,” says Fry. “But it was just like: You know what, it’s time we give him a break. He carried our team all year long in the ninth inning, and it’s our time to pick him up.”
That seemed for a while like nothing more than a nice sentiment. The Yankees added a run on a walk, an error and a sacrifice fly. According to FanGraphs, their win expectancy—which had been 9.1% before the Judge homer—had reached 92.7%. Luke Weaver, who this October has been the best closer east of Clase, came on and struck out Fry to strand runners at first and second in the bottom of the eighth. In the bottom of the ninth, Yankees first baseman Anthony Rizzo, who is playing with two broken fingers on his right hand, failed to come up with a grounder, but Weaver induced a ground-ball double play to raise that number to 98.6%.
Up came a man whose body temperature never seems to rise much above that mark, center fielder Lane Thomas, whose grand slam in Game 5 of the ALDS all but ended the series. He went down 0–2 but took three straight balls before getting a four-seamer low and inside. He clanged it off the wall.
Vogt summoned Noel, his 6’ 3”, 250-pound backup right fielder. Noel, 23, greeted the major leagues in June with a 413-foot blast but had not hit another since August. Still, says Hedges, “I mean, we’re all thinking it. He comes in to pinch hit and it’s like, Here we go, big boy.”
Noel decided to look for a pitch in. “It was about location,” he says through an interpreter. “That’s kind of, like, my strength, and I knew I was able to execute if he threw a fastball and then the changeup, as he did.”
Indeed, Weaver started him off with a fastball way outside. The next pitch was a changeup, low but in the middle of the plate. It re-tied the game so fast his teammates had no time to think.
“It was so much excitement, but then it was just like, ‘Oh, yeah, of course Jhonkensy hit a game-tying homer against a guy throwing 98 and [he] throws a changeup and [Noel] hits it for a homer,’” says Fry. “Nobody does that.”
“No bigger swing of the bat,” Vogt says, “Until that one in the 10th.”
The Guardians survived the top of the 10th thanks largely to a preposterous play in which second baseman Andrés Giménez, ranging into right field, thrust his glove at a chopper, spun, threw and watched first baseman Josh Naylor do nearly a split while falling over to prevent a sure double. “Andrés Giménez is the best infielder on the planet,” says Vogt. “That is just unbelievable defense by both of them.”
Catcher Bo Naylor, in the game after Vogt had pinch-hit for Hedges in the eighth, led off the bottom of the 10th with a first-pitch single. Shortstop Bryan Rocchio bunted him to second, and he took third on a groundout. Fry returned to the plate, thinking about that eighth-inning strikeout. He decided to look for a pitch up in the zone. On a 1–2 count, he got a sinker that didn’t sink. He crushed it to left field, and walked slowly down the line as he watched it go. Finally, he started dancing.
As the Guardians tried to still their heart rates in the clubhouse after the victory ceremony, they spoke of belief and resilience and trust in one another. They insisted they never let the moment get too big. And they praised the mentality that allows any player to feel he can be the one who comes through. Or, sometimes, two.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Guardians’ Late Game 3 Heroics Prompt a Change in Tradition.
