Clase, J-Ram roar back at Tigers in dominant Game 4 display

DETROIT — One was seemingly silent for much of this American League Division Series, the other was seeking to stage his redemption. And as the dust settled on a back-and-forth Game 4 that featured four lead changes, the Guardians avoided elimination on the shoulders of their best hitter and best pitcher.

José Ramírez crushed an emphatic 418-foot homer that sparked Cleveland toward a 5-4 win over the Tigers on Thursday night at Comerica Park, and Emmanuel Clase pushed the club to the finish line with a five-out save. Each emptied the emotional tank with their respective feats, underscoring how badly they wanted to deliver after uncharacteristic shortcomings in this series until this point.

And as Thursday’s path to victory showed, the Ramírez-Clase tandem will be vital for Cleveland to advance to its first AL Championship Series since 2016.

“They’re our best two players,” manager Stephen Vogt said. “They have been all year.”

With his go-ahead blast in the fifth inning, Ramírez snapped an 0-for-10 slump dating back to his RBI double in the first frame of Game 1, which sparked a five-spot and helped lift Cleveland to a tone-setting win in the opener.

Clase, meanwhile, entered Thursday with a one-run lead, two on and one out in the eighth. He then leveraged high-octane adrenaline to throw some of his fastest pitches of the season and escape the jam, capped with a staredown as he silenced the largest postseason crowd in Comerica Park history (44,923). Clase — working with a two-run lead — then surrendered one run in the ninth on the heels of a leadoff double by Justyn-Henry Malloy, but he limited the damage there.

The efforts of those two helped Cleveland end the longest losing streak in elimination games in postseason history at 11, dating back to Game 7 of the 1997 World Series.

“It was really important for us to play [the way we did in] this game,” Ramírez said through an interpreter.

Ramírez’s blast was his 40th of the year after he finished one shy of becoming just the seventh player in MLB history with a 40/40 season. That became even more of a statistical sting after the Guardians’ regular-season finale was canceled due to rain and lack of playoff implications. Ramírez is widely considered baseball’s most underrated star, and Thursday showed why. It was also a masterclass in hitting.

In the moments leading up to his homer, Ramírez steered way out of the on-deck circle and more behind the plate in an effort to time up lefty Tyler Holton — off whom he punched the double in Game 1. Batting from the right side, the switch-hitting Ramírez spit on a changeup way outside for ball one while nodding to himself in the batter’s box.

Trying to find the strike zone on his next offering, Holton got the changeup down but too much over the plate — and Ramírez didn’t miss, connecting at 109.9 mph, his hardest-hit homer of the year.

“I was looking for offspeed,” Ramírez said. “I know he has a good changeup, and I was trying to look him up, and I ended up getting a good connection on the ball.”

Holton had only surrendered two homers among the 269 changeups he’d thrown to that point.

“I hate when [Ramírez] comes up to bat,” Tigers manager A.J. Hinch said. “I love the player from the other side. We’ve been keeping him in a pretty good place so far, but up to this point, the fourth game of the series, he shows exactly what he’s capable of.”

Clase entered with one out in the eighth and quickly induced a groundout from Zach McKinstry, who hit a momentum-seizing go-ahead homer in the fifth off Tanner Bibee. He punched 100 mph cutters in on Trey Sweeney’s hands, the last of which yielded strike three on a hack so hard that it spun the lefty’s helmet off.

“A lot of strong emotions, getting back to this game,” Clase said through an interpreter. “I was really excited to get to the mound, especially getting the trust back from [Vogt] to get me in that role and that responsibility.”

Clase leaned almost exclusively on his cutter, throwing it for 14 of his 16 pitches while seeing a 1 mph uptick from his 99.5 mph season average. The strategy was by design, after surrendering a gut-wrenching three-run homer to Kerry Carpenter on his slider during Cleveland’s 3-0 loss in Game 2. Thursday also marked only the second time in 77 outings this season in which he recorded more than three outs.

“It’s win or go home,” Vogt said. “You want your best pitchers out there as long as possible. … We had talked about before the game Emmanuel getting four to five outs if we needed that, and tonight, we did. And he was outstanding.”

The Guardians are 70-9 when Clase pitches and 29-9 when Ramírez homers, including the playoffs. Cleveland’s blueprint to victory hinges heavily on them — and that will assuredly be the case again in Saturday’s Game 5.