As the Guardians prepare for Game 5, emotions run high: “This is what you dream about”

CLEVELAND — Twenty-two hours before he was set to throw the first pitch in the biggest game of his life, Matthew Boyd cried.

He didn't expect to shed tears, but the more he thought about the opportunity that lay before him and the journey he had taken to get to this point, the more he realized that his feelings couldn't hide. He couldn't have imagined that it would be an easy task to turn on autopilot in Game 5 on Saturday afternoon and make his way through the Detroit Tigers' lineup, oblivious to the stakes, the crowd and the moment.

“It’s whatever you want,” Boyd said. “It means you’re alive. It means your heart is beating. It's all energy. You just use it for good.”

By the time the league opened the 2024 season, Boyd had moved into the coaching role in the Pacific Northwest, serving as manager of his 7-year-old's softball team and his 5-year-old's T-ball team. As he completed his recovery from Tommy John surgery, he was without a major league team and had no certainty that this season would bring him anything more than a pain-free elbow.

His daughter kept asking why he wasn't pitching. By the end of June, he was healthy and ready to sign, and when the energy of Cleveland's dugout poured out of his television during a win at Baltimore, he knew he wanted to be a part of it.

Four months later, the Guardians handed him the ball, their season hanging in the balance. On the other side is his former team, whose rotation he once anchored. His opponent on the mound for Detroit will be his former mentee Tarik Skubal, who has become the best pitcher in the world.

As the gravity of the situation dawned on him Friday afternoon—a web of storylines that somehow collided to create a Hollywood-worthy script—Boyd needed a few breaths to compose himself.

“This is what you dream about,” he said. “That’s what you want.”

Someone's season ends Saturday afternoon. Dejected players sit in a dugout and stare at their opponents, who form a dog pile on the infield turf.

There is no greater dichotomy in sports. The line between winning and losing is thin, and the consequences for winners and losers couldn't be more drastic. It's either a beer party or a funeral. Either it's bass music vibrating the carpet in the clubhouse, or it's the silence of a library, with the occasional murmur of someone asking when locker cleaning is the next day.

A group of players will dunk each other in champagne, puff on cigars and board a flight to New York City. The other picks up his belongings and then books a flight to relax in a poolside cabana somewhere hundreds of miles south of Detroit or Cleveland.

“You want to be at these games,” said Guardians manager Stephen Vogt. “You don’t play in an elimination game if you don’t have a good year.”

Stephen Vogt watches Game 4 from the dugout, which the Guardians won 5-4. (Duane Burleson/Getty Images)

Sports spoil us with these possibilities, with winner-take-all games where every fan is at one end or the other of the emotional spectrum with no chance of anything in between. There's nothing but agony until your team records its 27th game.

It's grueling, heartbreaking, stomach-churning, and leg-twitch-inducing. It is the opposite of the sport's regular season. And it is a beautiful thing – terrible, twisted, unforgiving, cruel beauty.

Tyler Freeman has torn his oblique muscle, and as he strains himself as a cheerleader in the dugout for every pitch, he has to be careful not to set himself up for a strikeout or, say, David Fry's pinch-hit, go-ahead homer in the game 4 overreacted. Vogt's three children all lost their voices on Thursday evening as they called out for their father's team. Hunter Gaddis' father keeps telling everyone he's not nervous, but his son doesn't believe him.

And the fans in Detroit and Cleveland, at Progressive Field and in their living rooms, are drowning in fear, even though they know it's everything they signed up for when they invested in their team in spring training or whenever the move stopped at her front door.

For Cleveland fans, Friday marked the 76th anniversary of the franchise's last title. A crucial playoff game is nothing they haven't experienced before. But a Game 5 at Progressive Field on Saturday afternoon is guaranteed to still be remembered fondly — or for all the wrong reasons.

You never know which pitch will change the course of the game and therefore the season. It's the kind of torture that once convinced Terry Francona to order $44 worth of room service ice cream in the middle of the night during the 2016 playoffs. It's the kind of torture that led Guardians general manager Mike Chernoff to go on a run after Game 3 and spend the morning of Game 4 in the gym, a way to channel boundless nervous energy into something meaningful.

It is the height of sports drama and excitement. It's enough to make a grown man cry.

“We live and die with every pitch,” catcher Austin Hedges said. “Whether we show it or not, every single pitch means the world to us. But it's also the greatest thing ever because you know the risk-reward ratio is so great. You know, if you lose, it will be so heartbreaking.

“But when you win and do it right, there’s no better feeling in the world.”

(Top photo by Matthew Boyd: Nick Cammett / Getty Images)