The Guardians need Tanner Bibee to get back to looking like an ace 

Not much went right for the Guardians on their six game road trip last week. Their bullpen blew game after game. The bats went silent. The starting pitchers didn’t go deep into games. 

After cutting their deficit in the Wild Card chase to just 1/2 games, they’re now five games back in the Wild Card race and clinging onto the faintest postseason hopes.

But they’ve got a chance to turn all of that around today with Tanner Bibee on the mound at home against the Rays. When the Guardians gave Bibee his five-year extension in the spring, they did it with the expectation that he’d be the stopper in situations like this. 

While Bibee’s season hasn’t gone as expected, this is the perfect opportunity for him to show why the Guardians’ front office invested in him in the offseason. 

The Guardians need Tanner Bibee to look like an ace today 

Bibee enters play today with a 4.62 ERA in 142 1/3 innings this year, which is far and away the worst numbers he’s put up in his short career. He’s allowed at least two earned runs in his last 15 starts, and has only gone more than six innings only one in the last two months. 

Bibee’s start against Arizona last week was emblematic of how his season has gone. While he racked up five strikeouts and only allowed one walk, he gave up the lead twice and allowed three triples and a home run. Although Austin Hedges said after the start that Bibee’s stuff looked “really good,” it doesn’t change the fact that he’s giving up far too much hard contact this year. 

And while that abundance of hard contact is never great, it’s even worse when the Guardians are getting next to nothing from their offense. The Guardians have slashed a major league-low .176/.226/.256 over the last seven days, and were shut out in the final two games of their series against the Rangers. 

"It's been a long road trip for us," Stephen Vogt said after the loss, which dropped the Guardians below .500 since the beginning of July. “We have not played well, and we need to play better, and we know that. So we're frustrated, but we also know that there's a game tomorrow and we're going to be ready to go.”

It’s not hard to tell where Bibee’s struggled this year. His strikeout rate’s down, while his hard-hit, barrel rate and walk rate are all up. Hitters are hitting more than 100 points better on his cutter this season compared to last year, and they’ve hit 11 home runs off his fastball. 

His sweeper is still a wipeout pitch, but it’s a lot tougher to set it up when there’s no bite on anything else that he throws. 

The good news is that he’s going to get a chance to turn things around against a Rays team that has combined for a .234 batting average this month. 

The Guardians don’t have any room for error left thanks to their struggles, so they’re going to need to get as much production as possible from the studs in their lineup — Bibee being the most important one.