3 Guardians players who need to heat up before the start of May

The start of the Cleveland Guardians’ 2026 season has been a bit of a roller coaster. After starting the season with competitive series against the Mariners, Dodgers and Cubs, they’ve hit a bit of a skid lately and just lost a series against the rebuilding Cardinals. 

While that’s going to happen across the course of a 162-game season, there are still some obvious places they can improve to get back to their winning ways. 

Here are three players who can help with that. 

Bo Naylor, Chase DeLauter and Tanner Bibee need to find their groove 

C Bo Naylor 

While the Guardians’ catching situation isn’t as dire as it was during the early 2020s, Naylor’s struggles have slowly been bubbling under the surface. The Guardians’ top catching option is currently slashing .158/.238/.184 on the season — stats that would be worse had he not picked up two hits against the Cardinals on Wednesday. 

That said, it seems like Naylor’s primed for an upset based on how things are looking under the hood. Although he has that ugly looking statline, 55% of the balls he’s put in play were rated as “hard-hit”, so he’s clearly making hard contact. 

Couple that with being in the 91st percentile in whiff rate and the 82nd percentile in barrel rate, and all of a sudden you’ve got a picture of someone who is putting up quality at-bats but not getting the kind of results that tend to come with that. 

Although Austin Hedges may have earned a bit more time behind the plate thanks to his strong start at the plate, Naylor is clearly the Guardians’ No. 1 option behind the plate. The Guardians’ lineup is at its best when he’s in it. 

OF Chase DeLauter 

The start of DeLauter’s 2026 campaign felt like a dream. Every swing was violent, every ball was hard-hit and every game seemed to end in a win. 

But it’s been a bit of a nightmare lately. 

After opening his regular season career with five home runs in his first seven games, DeLauter’s hit .188 with no home runs in the 10 games he’s played in since. While he’s gotten on base at a .348 clip in that time period, he hasn’t been able to square balls up in the same manner that he was earlier in the season. 

It’s not a coincidence the Guardians have gone 4-6 in those 10 games. 

He’s still making a ton of quality contact (his Baseball Savant page looks like a murder scene), but that hasn’t led to positive results. Even if he’s going to eventually turn that around, the Guardians have hit a point in their season where they need him to drive in runs. 

RHP Tanner Bibee

Bibee’s year started with the highlight of him making his long-awaited Opening Day start. Not much has gone right since. 

After leaving that Opening Day start with a shoulder injury, the 27-year-old hasn’t made it out of the fifth inning in his three starts since and is coming off an outing where he allowed eight runs in 4 2/3 innings against the Kansas City Royals. 

Although he’s never going to be a true swing-and-miss pitcher, he’s only struck out 22% of the batters he’s faced this year while hitters have barreled up 10% of the balls they’ve put in play against him. 

Not only is he not hitting his spots, but he’s missing in places where batters can square up his pitches. 

Although his struggles haven’t been back-breaking thanks to the emergence of Parker Messick and Joey Cantillo picking up where he left off last year, it’s going to be hard for this team to compete if Bibee isn’t pitching like a front-line starter. 

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