Admittedly, not everything has gone right over the course of this season for the Guardians. It never does. Really, it would be weird if it did- for any team. That’s the nature of 162 games over the course of six months. One thing that really has gone right though is that Cleveland has been able to lean on two healthy run producers in the middle of their order every step of the way.
To that point, on Monday, something a little special happened that exemplifies this. With a two-run home run in the top of the 6th inning off of Royals reliever Kris Bubic, Josh Naylor notched his 100th RBI on the season. This is the first time in his career that Naylor, commonly the Guardians’ clean-up hitter now for the third season running, has hit this plateau.
Naylor should have hit this same distinction last season. He was at 79 RBI at the end of July, but lost all of August due to injury and ended up landing at 97 RBI for the year. It has been a long road back from the devastating injury Naylor suffered in June 2021 that saw him miss the rest of the season and some of 2022 due to a collision in the outfield, but he has made it.
Outside of a few games missed here and there, Naylor has been healthy and in the lineup throughout the course of 2024. He has played in 133 of 142 games and manned the fourth spot of the order in 119 of them. He is also just one round-tripper away from becoming a 30-homer man, another hallmark of a bonafide potent middle-of-the-order hitter.
These are all really nice milestones for Naylor, who has turned into the best player to be involved in the 2020 Mike Clevinger trade with the Padres (for either team). Often stoic and even keeled in interviews, he shows incredible intensity on the field, which his teammates feed off of. In other words, at 27 years old and having graduated into a legitimate Major League hitter and first baseman to be reckoned with, he has also become a leader.
Which matches him well with the man who often hits in front of him in the order, Jose Ramirez. If you don’t know Ramirez’s accolades by now, I would be shocked. He is the face of the franchise. The man who turned down the big dollars of free agency to stay in Cleveland and remain one of the ten best players in all of baseball for this organization. I’ve written about him further several times, here is one example. More to the leadership side of things, catcher Austin Hedges recently commented that he’s never seen anyone lead by example better in his career than Ramirez.
Of course, Ramirez also walks the walk on the field. He produces. The perennial MVP candidate has actually also reached the 100 RBI mark on the season, currently standing at 106 on the campaign. That number is good for second in all of baseball behind Aaron Judge. Ramirez is also accompanied by Judge and Shohei Ohtani as the only ballplayers thus far this season to have both 100 runs scored and 100 RBI.
Parsing Ramirez and Naylor together as a unit, hitting third and fourth in Guardians order throughout the season, they have accomplished something that no other pair- not Judge and Soto, not Ohtani and Betts or Ohtani and Freeman, not Witt and Perez– have yet done. Ramirez and Naylor are the first two hitters on any team this year to both reach those 100 RBIs.
For a franchise that has a reputation for being without punch in recent years, these two have been a catalyst to turning that narrative around. Cleveland hit 27 fewer home runs than any other team in 2023. They were 24th in wRC+. Being respectable may not seem like much, but when compared to last season, it can make a world of difference. The Guardians are 14th in homers and 15th in wRC+ this year, pairing that improvement with the best bullpen in baseball and a starting rotation that appears to be on the rise at the right time (save Gavin Williams‘s outing on Saturday night) makes them a dangerous team in October. Being one game out from having the best record in the American League says as much.
While Ramirez and Naylor have done the hitting that has driven in more than 200 runs, it is important to remember that RBIs really are a team stat. Many of those runs driven in don’t happen without Steven Kwan or Andres Gimenez or David Fry or whomever else being on base to drive in. The Guardians’ offense is improved in 2024. They are hitting better as an entire unit, and Ramirez’s and Naylor’s success, in part, is a symptom of that.
The final step will be bringing that success to the post-season. Not to be cliche, but one of the reasons October is great is because it allows the opportunity for the game’s best to shine on the biggest stage. It gives them the opportunity to announce that they really are the best. Ramirez and Naylor could be poised to take 2024’s success and turn it into a major announcement, not just for themselves, but for the Cleveland Guardians at large.
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