Cleveland Guardians' Gavin Williams, Tanner Bibee show ace potential, can They Maintain Consistency?

The pair of 26 year-old righties have both turned in stellar performances since the beginning of August, including the notable August 6th near no-hitter effort from Gavin Williams against a potent Mets lineup. More recently, Tanner Bibee threw his first career complete game shutout, when the Guardians needed it most, allowing just two hits on 106 dominant pitches and earning a staggering 93 game score.

The talent of these two young starters has never been in question inside the clubhouse at Progressive Field, but the question remains – will they be able to maintain this level of consistent success here in Cleveland?

Juxtaposed with those career-defining showings, both Bibee and Gavin Williams each posted starts that qualified in their bottom five of the season according to Baseball reference’s game score, most notably including the highly-publicized August 25th dugout outburst from Bibee against the Tampa Bay Rays.

Since each pitcher’s promotion to the Majors in 2023, their respective weaknesses have been clear: Bibee allows too many untimely home runs and Williams struggles to avoid walks.

Diving into the numbers with Bibee, his HR/9 (home runs allowed per nine innings pitched) has doubled from 0.8 in his 2023 rookie campaign, where he allowed just 13 home runs in 142 innings across his 25 starts, to 1.4 this season. Last season, Bibee saw that number increase to 1.1 HR/9 in his 31 starts and then increase once more to 1.4 HR/9 this season, allowing 27 long balls through 29 starts.

Williams continues to have dominant, workhorse type ability on the mound for Cleveland but struggles to avoid walking batters. In his first full season as a frontline starter for the Guardians, Williams has acquitted himself well to the full-time role, accruing 3.2 WAR and a 3.16 ERA through 29 starts. The key metric to watch is Gavin’s BB/9 (walks per nine innings pitched), which continues to creep higher and stands at 4.5. As Williams throws more innings in the big leagues, it’s unsurprising to see his K/9 (strikeouts per nine innings pitched) rate take a small tick down from 9.4 to 8.7, but the concerning metric is his strikeout to walk rate has dropped dramatically from 2.47 in 2024 to just 1.92 this season.

The Guardians have been the poster child around Major League Baseball for pitching development for nearly a decade, with names like Corey Kluber, Mike Clevinger and Shane Bieber becoming front of the rotation mainstays. 

Other starters like Triston McKenzie, Zach Plesac and Cal Quantrill have all shown flashes of brilliance in the early 2020s, but then faced a rapid decline, no longer taking the mound for the organization that helped them develop such dominance.

Bibee and Williams are developmental success stories and have largely followed the same mold as all of the pitchers listed above since being selected by Cleveland in the 2021 MLB Amateur draft, but can they maintain the consistency needed to elevate their names into the highest esteem of Cleveland’s vaunted pitching factory?