Jim Ingraham: Looks like pitching will have to carry the load for Guardians

It doesn't take a hardball Sherlock Holmes to see where the offensively-challenged Guardians need some help. If you happened to check in at the Guards' page at Baseball-Reference.com before Friday's game at Seattle to see how well the lads have been striking the sphere this season, well, let's just say that the 1927 Yankees have nothing to worry about. Bo Naylor: .192, Jhonkensy Noel: .146, Brayan Rocchio: .165, Lane Thomas .164, Austin Hedges: .113, Will Wilson: 176, David Fry: .143, Johnathan Rodriguez: .176, Will Brennan: .091. Granted, there aren't many everyday players in the above paragraph. Those batting averages tell you why. What those batting averages also tell you is this: The everyday players better not get hurt. The most frustrating part about being a Guardians fan is that the Guards are what they are and their fans know what they are. The fans also know that what the Guards have become is a shaky baseball team playing in a world class facility. Maybe that was part of the plan when the Guardians decided to jazz up the joint and hope that a fresh coat of paint, bells and whistles would be enough to entice the region's fans to not pay so much attention to those pesky attendance figures. The team is not drawing poorly. Far from it. The team also isn't a winning machine, and the standings prove it. So far this year the Guardians rank 22nd in the majors in total attendance. Their average home crowd is 22,978. Last season, the Guards ranked 20th in both total attendance (2,056,264) and per-game attendance (25,703). So, what do we make of this with the season nearly half over? Have all the horns and bells and bells and horns spiked the home attendance? It's probably still too early to tell, but as all Cleveland sports fans know, it gets late fast around here. What the Guards need most now is one of those Tito-driven hot streaks, when everything falls into place, including the standings. The Guardians won their division last season and came one step away from reaching the World Series. Nobody around here seems to be expecting a repeat performance this year, although that's why they play 162 games, so the wheat and the chaff can make their case. What's hurt the Guardians the most this year is that their opponents have gotten better and the Guardians have not. Make no mistake about it, that is not how they drew up this season. What they also didn't draw up was a repeat of last season's pitching staff implosion, which, unfortunately, seems to be coming a gruesome habit in these parts. Shane Bieber still isn't pitching in games this year, and that's good news for nobody in Cleveland, where the magical pitching coach Carl Willis is standing by to lead the second-half pitching charge, hopefully with enough second-half juice to get the Fighting Vogters not just back into postseason form but physically into postseason form. It can be done, because it has been done with Willis and a front office filled with pitching bloodhounds who seem to know where all the best arms are in the second half of the season for a team that frequently must call on the pitching calvary to lead the September charge. As we all know, the pitchers must lead that charge, because most of the hitters are too busy looking at strike three to lead any kind of offensive charge. Let's face it. If "Guards Ball" stands for anything, it's for figuring out ways to rejuvenate a pitching staff that is out of gas on September first but always seems to be able to find the right filling stations to make the last two weeks of the month interesting. Nevermind how the ballpark looks. What matters is how does the pitching staff look in mid-September? That's what will decide whether this year's team will have to wait until next year or can it maneuver itself — buttressed by a hopefully healthy and rejuvenated Bieber — back into contention as the little pitching staff that could. Former rookie manager Stephen Vogt has been around the track enough by now to if not catch then at least put some heat on the Tigers, who have blown right past last year's AL Central champs with a pitching staff that looks like it was stolen out of Vogt's garage. What the Guardians don't need is one of those midseason swan dives like they suffered in a hideous road trip to the Brewers and to the Yankees last summer, which seemed to set the stage for a sloppy ending. There is ground to be made up for sure. On Friday night, Cleveland began a dangerous nine-game, booby-trapped west-coast trip fraught with all kinds of potential peril, including three games with the homeless A's, who for all we know may have joined a bowling league. Contact Jim Ingraham at jingraham4@gmail.com.