The Rest Of The AL Central Should Be Terrified The Guardians Have Hung Around And Now Triston McKenzie Is Back Dominating

Welcome back Dr. Sticks. And not a moment too soon. 

The Guardians pissed away the first two games of their series with Minnesota and had me on the brink of turning into some midwest version of Frank The Tank. Two more losses would have had them 7.5 back and left with very little margin for error the rest of the way. But before I could start chewing on my necklace and air punching/singing insults about Guardians players they turned things around.

They bounced back with two straight wins to split the series including an absolute fucking gem from Triston McKenzie, which featured his nasty new slider.

The Guardians still have a bottom two offense in baseball by just about every metric known to man so the pitching needs to be dominant for them to win. At some point Jose Ramirez will get his pop back and Andres Gimenez will start looking like a major league hitter again (that already has kind of started over the last week) but until then they need guys who can flat out deal.

And McKenzie is that dude.

A lot of people had him as a sleeper Cy Young candidate before the year started and he was sidelined for two months with a shoulder injury. But it looks as though McKenzie is all the way back and that's bad news for the rest of the worst division in baseball.

The AL Central is the neighbors down the street who never cut their grass and their kid drives the annoyingly loud Honda Civic. You can heard the Royals and White Sox blasting Pitbull out the window at 4am on any random weekday.

But the most likely candidate to get their shit together and be a legit threat in the AL is still the Guardians. They have the manager in Tito Francona, the starting pitching (Logan Allen and Tanner Bibee have been insanely good in their rookie campaign), the bullpen (after a rocky start to the season they have the second lowest ERA and lowest WHIP in the AL), and one would assume they will have a progression to the mean offensively.

At least they better. Because you aren't going to get a McKenzie type performance every single time out and they'll need to score more than 2 freaking runs a game if they want to win. The Guardians have already played an absurd number of games decided by one run and even an incremental improvement on offense would give them a boost to first place in the division.

The one thing I know everyone in Cleveland can agree upon (while everyone on the outside hates their little hearts out) is that the AL Central being this bad is the only reason we are still alive. With just 27 wins the Guardians would be in last in the East and second to last in the West. But you can only play who is in front of you which means the Guardies have a ton of matchups with dog shit opponents the rest of the way.

A Guardians run is coming. I can feel it. 

Say it loud and wear it proud, Cleveland. THANK GOD THE CENTRAL SUCKS.