A chance for the Cleveland Guardians to shake up the AL Central

There is still a little over a week left in the month of May, but it is pretty clear that the Cleveland Guardians are about to embark on their biggest series of the season, at least so far. Cleveland heads to Detroit to face the AL Central-leading Tigers, and they have an opportunity to shake things up in what has been the most competitive division in baseball.

The Guardians currently sit in fourth place in the American League Central division, trailing first place Detroit by six games. While there is no chance for Cleveland to supplant the Tigers atop the division, there is a chance for them to close the gap between first place and the rest of the division (excluding the last place Chicago White Sox, of course).

At 26-22, the Guardians are half of a game behind both the Kansas City Royals and Minnesota Twins for second place in the AL Central, with the latter holding a slight advantage based on winning percentage (.541-.549). With the Royals and Twins playing a three-game series this weekend, the Guardians could very well change the outlook in the AL Central with a successful series in Detroit.

This is a series the Guardians need to win in the worst way possible, but settling for a four-game split would at least prove they are not the AL Central pushovers many have made them out to be. At the same time, it would also show that Detroit is not an unstoppable force atop the AL Central that nobody can catch.

The odds are against Cleveland in this series, as the Guardians and Tigers have been performing at very different levels this season. Detroit has won seven of their last 10 games and comes into the series with a major league-leading 33-17 record and second-best run-differential (+85). Meanwhile, the Guardians are 3-7 over that same span, with their 26-22 record being nothing special and their -17 run-differential being the ninth-worst in all of baseball, in addition to being the only team with a winning record to be in the red in that department.

Even though it seems likely that the Guardians will come up short in Detroit this weekend, counting them out would be a colossal mistake. Cleveland won seven of their 13 regular season meetings in 2024, in addition to defeating the Tigers three games to two in the American League Divison Series to advance to the ALCS against eventual AL-Champion New York Yankees. Even though the Tigers outscored the Guardians 60-50 in the regular season last year, Cleveland held a 19-13 edge in the postseason, showing that this team knows how to take care of business against a divisional opponent when it matters most.

If the Guardians treat this series like a playoff series (they should), there is no telling how things end up in Detroit once the series is concluded sometime on Sunday afternoon. Cleveland has proven they can hang with teams like the Tigers before. All they have to do is prove it again, and then, just maybe, they will be taken a little more seriously on the national landscape rather than continue to be recklessly discarded as an also-ran.