A 393-foot swing in his own backyard
Austin Hedges grew up in San Juan Capistrano, a short drive down the coast from Angel Stadium. Overnight he came to the plate there in the sixth inning with Angel Genao aboard after a walk and Cleveland holding a one-run lead.
Blake Weiman went to a slider on 2-1. Hedges drove it a Statcast-projected 393 feet to centre field, clearing the yellow line that separates a long out from a home run in that ballpark. The two-run shot pushed the lead to three and the Guardians closed out a 4-2 win in the opener of a three-game series.
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A career line being rewritten at 34
The number that makes this season strange is the one Hedges carried into it. Across 820 games and parts of 13 seasons, the catcher owned a .185/.244/.313 slash line. He built a career on framing, blocking and running a pitching staff, and nobody pretended the bat was part of the argument.
This year the bat has shown up. In 199 plate appearances over 67 games, Hedges is hitting .270 with a .338 on-base percentage. Both would be career highs. His .397 slugging percentage sits third on his own list, behind the .429 he posted in 2018 and the .398 from 2017.
Level again after 18 games of treading water
The win was Cleveland’s fifth in a row and moved the club to 66-66. The last time the Guardians stood at .500 was the morning of August 5, when they were 57-57. Nine wins and nine losses later, they are back where they started, which says plenty about how the middle of this month went.
Rookie Parker Messick did the heavy lifting on the mound. He worked six innings, gave up one run on three hits and a walk, and struck out four. It was another controlled outing from a starter who has given Cleveland something steady while the offence has come and gone.
Two more games in Anaheim will tell the Guardians whether this run is a genuine push or another flat stretch dressed up as one.
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