Cleveland Guardians: Best and worst of April

April's Worst for the Cleveland Guardians: Losing Shane Bieber after just two starts

It was an absolute gut punch to hear that Shane Bieber's season was over after just two starts.Bieber was looking absolutely dominant and it appeared that he was back to his Cy Young caliber self. Unfortunately, that all came to an end when it was announced that he would be undergoing Tommy John surgery that would bring this outstanding start to a screeching halt. 

This goes hand-in-hand with the previous mention of Guardians starting pitchers not going deep into games. Bieber pitched 6 innings in both of his starts, something that has only been accomplished three other times by three different pitchers.Not having Bieber in the rotation is only going to make those occurrences less frequent than they would have been, and that is going to be a problem.

Bieber has shown that he can pitch a high volume of innings when called upon. Losing a veteran arm of this stature with a trio of young arms in their rotation (one is yet to debut in 2024 but is still expected to be a meaningful contributor) could prove costly. The injury to Bieber has provided Carlos Carrasco with a few more opportunities to continue his run with the team, in addition to veteran pitcher Ben Lively being a possible unlikely savior to this rotation. These two should be able to help make up for the loss of Bieber, but everyone would feel a lot better about the Guardians' chances come October.