Tanner Bibee’s return to ace-dom gives Guardians yet another advantage in AL Central 

On Wednesday, Tanner Bibee took the mound for the Cleveland Guardians and turned in six scoreless innings in an eventual Guardians win. 

While Bibee’s outing wasn’t as big of a story after the game thanks to Cade Smith blowing his save opportunity and Kahlil Watson coming up clutch, Bibee’s start could end up becoming the biggest trend to pay attention to from the game considering how important Bibee is to the Guardians’ success. 

Tanner Bibee’s is starting to look like the Guardians’ ace again

It may seem hard to believe considering how rough the start to Bibee’s season was, but he’s been worth 1.4 bWAR this season, which is just behind Gavin Williams’ mark of 1.5. 

Although bWAR isn’t the end all be all when it comes to evaluating a player’s success, that does serve as a good indicator of how things have gone for both pitchers so far in 2026. 

Williams started the season on a hot streak (2.70 ERA at the end of April), but he’s had a 4.73 ERA in 53 1/3 innings in nine starts since. While he allowed one run in 15 innings across starts against the Phillies and Nationals, he’s also allowed 3+ runs in five starts in the span. 

He’s still racking up strikeouts in bunches (86th percentile in whiff and strikeout rate), but he’s also allowing far too much hard contact, as nearly 49% of the balls put in play against him have been classified as “hard-hit.” 

Loud contract is always going to be a problem for Williams since he has such a stellar fastball (96.6 miles per hour), but he was able to mitigate that problem last year by getting ahead in counts and relying on his strong arsenal to get strikeouts. 

And, as Williams has struggled, Bibee seems to have found his stride. His season got off to a rough start when he left his start on Opening Day after five innings due to an arm injury, and his ERA ballooned to 6.38 after four starts following a disastrous outing against the Braves. 

But he’s quietly looked like a frontline ace in the time since, and has a 3.16 ERA in his 13 starts since that Braves outing (77 innings). In fact, if you remove his outing against the Nationals at the end of May when he allowed seven runs in three innings, he has a 2.43 outing in that span. 

While Bibee’s advanced stats don’t jump off the page, he’s held batters to a .244 batting average with his fastball and has allowed just five extra-base hits with his cutter (both of which he throws 25% of the time). 

When Bibee’s at his best, he’s pounding the zone with those two pitches while getting some swing-and-miss with everything else. 

That’s exactly what happened against the White Sox, as he got eight whiffs and gave up just four batted balls with an exit velocity greater than 95 miles per hour. 

The current iteration of the Guardians is always going to be based around pitching, and a dominant version of Bibee gives the Guardians fantastic top-three at the top of their rotation alongside Williams and rookie phenom Parker Messick. 

Add us as a preferred source on Google

Follow