Yahoo Sports senior MLB analyst Jordan Shusterman and senior MLB analyst Jake Mintz preview the American League Championship Series between the New York Yankees and the Cleveland Guardians and highlight the pitching matchups we’ll see in the series. Hear the full conversation on the “Baseball Bar-B-Cast” podcast - and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

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Video Transcript

Watching Cleveland play offense is fun.

Cleveland is a better college baseball program.

However, the Yankees have a better lineup.

How about that?

How do you feel about this outrageous?

Take Cleveland better offense, Yankees better lineup.

Oh, don't believe that the ceiling for this Yankees offense is still so much higher.

And if you're gonna get performances from Stan again, we still haven't seen much that much from Jazz Wells was extremely quiet uh against the Royals, but there are still, there's like not quite to the Dodgers level, but there's just more guys that if you make a mistake, they're just, they're just gonna punish you, which is most relevant because of how different that is compared to respectfully the Tigers of Detroit, right?

This, you could just get away with so much more against an offense of Detroit's caliber than you can uh against the Yankees.

And, and to me, it's that simple, we are going to see Carlos Jordan against Alex Cobb in game one that is confirmed, then we have what is really, I'm glad we are getting, which is Garrett Cole versus Tanner Bobby.

And I will say that I do think Tanner Biy is just being underrated in general just across all of the discussions of Cleveland.

I, I think Bobby is, is good.

I think Bobby is a really, really good starting pitcher and I don't think he deserves to be glossed over, um, in, in this collective unit.

I'm gonna gloss over him a little bit here because the difference between him and what the Yankees have is the lack of length.

So babe, in his two postseason starts went four and four and two thirds.

He threw 64 pitches and 76 pitches.

Now, part of that is just because it's the guard.

I mean, that's the plug and send the bullpen out, right.

But obviously you would always rather have the pitchers who are going to give you more innings and the Yankees definitely have that with Cole, they probably have that with Schmidt.

You know, that the Yankees should have to rely on their bullpen less.

Can the bullpen be as good as against Kansas City?

Which where they didn't allow an earned run possibly?

But if they get exposed more, how does that work out?

Cleveland?

Of course, they leaned on them so heavily against Detroit and they barely got by when they needed the outs.

They did have them even though they did have a few hiccups there with class a, even Kate Smith Gattis had a couple shaky moments.

So I think that the gap is a little bit closer than, than you might assume going into it.

But it's just gonna be about the, I think the, you know, proportion of innings that they're relying on the bullpen for both of those teams.

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