2022 MLB Playoffs: Can rejuvenated Shane Bieber pull Guardians back from brink?

By Jake Mintz
FOX Sports MLB Writer

Once upon a time, not too long ago, Shane Bieber was the best pitcher on planet earth.

To be fair, that was during the COVID-shortened 2020 campaign, that magnificent farce of a baseball season. For a sport designed to be decided over six months, 60 games was simply not enough time to establish a significant sample. 

It's hilarious to look back now. Luke Voit led baseball with 22 homers. Dom Smith finished seventh in OPS. The Miami Marlins made the freakin' playoffs. Trying to distinguish the bogus from the substantive was a fool's errand. Gazing into that statistical haze could make you woozy, make you believe in lies.

But what Bieber did that year was real.

During that abridged season, Bieber was stupid good. Beneath the silent echoes of empty stadium rows lined with cardboard cutouts, the then-25-year-old swaggered out to the hill every five days and carved through hapless lineup after hapless lineup like a chainsaw through butter. Other than "essential personnel," nobody witnessed the magic in person. On television, though, Bieber's late-summer starts became late-era quarantine appointment viewing, "Tiger King" for the attentive baseball fan. 

In his 12 starts, Bieber allowed only 14 runs in 77⅓ innings, with a magnificent 122-21 strikeout-to-walk ratio to boot. Even in the complicated muck of an abbreviated season, with some doubting the legitimacy of his team's cushy COVID Cup schedule, Bieber's dominance left no doubt when it came to award voting. He won the AL Cy Young unanimously, the first pitcher to do so since Justin Verlander in 2011. 

Heading into 2021, Bieber was a hurler on top of the world, the league at his fingertips, a half-decade of dominance within his grasp.

That's when his shoulder started to hurt.

The 2022 Cleveland Guardians are an adorable story. They're a rag-tag group of buddies who refuse to strike out and enjoy playing baseball together, a young and energetic group led by Terry Francona that flat-out outclassed a more-talented-on-paper White Sox team to capture a division crown. Also, they have José Ramírez. 

But after a crowd-pleasing, wild-card-round-winning, 15th-inning blast off the bat of a rookie who walks up to the "SpongeBob SquarePants" theme song, this autumn's most heartwarming ballclub was dealt a heavy dose of reality. The New York Yankees, their enormous payroll and their even larger players soundly dispatched the baby Clevelanders on Tuesday in Game 1 of the ALDS by a score of 4-1.

To call the Guardians' current offense lifeless is an affront to the deceased. In their two games against Tampa Bay, they scored a grand total of three runs and won the series anyway. Game 1 at Yankee Stadium against Gerrit Cole was more of the same, with Cleveland's only run a solo shot from unlikely hero Steven Kwan.

And that's where Bieber comes in.

Bieber, who was stellar in his Game 1 start against the Rays, will take the ball against New York on Friday (Thursday's game was postponed due to weather) with a legitimate shot to even a series in which Cleveland has been given little chance. A win would send things back to Progressive Field knotted at one, with Cleveland's other ace, Triston McKenzie, slated to start Game 3. 

If the Guardians want their cute, quirky season to be more than a feel-good footnote in franchise history, they'll need their ace, their horse, to shove against the Bronx Bombers in Game 2.

Typically calm and understatedly cool, Bieber is unmistakably from California. He's generally unfazed, unbothered, chill as a Yeti in a walk-in freezer. Also, he says "dude" a lot.

But beneath that outer layer is a fierce competitor, a dude who, when he's on the mound, wants to "f--- your s--- up." Unlike many of his peers, Bieber doesn't have a bone-rattling heater that threatens triple digits and makes your arm hair stand up. His success relies on impeccable fastball command, a deep arsenal of pitches and a grandmaster's mentality: five moves ahead of you at all times.

And now, after almost a full year of pitching at limited capacity due to his injury, the man is undeniably back. But he's not just 2020 Bieber two years later. No, this is a sharper, more focused and more appreciative version of the pitcher who set baseball ablaze. And that's because, for the first time in his career, Bieber had to sit out.

Like every other pitcher in the world, Bieber had experienced some level of arm discomfort before; that's an unavoidable reality of the gig. But those other times, he pitched through it until the pain subsided. And so, he didn't think much of the aching in his shoulder last season, assuming that sooner or later it would fade. Besides, he was still pitching exceptionally well, racking up numbers only a tick worse than the season before.

But two months into the 2021 season, the pain remained. In fact, it had gotten worse. On start days, Bieber could grit his teeth and ride the adrenaline through six innings of work, but between his outings, the pain became unbearable. He worked to mitigate the discomfort to no avail, and by the beginning of June, the right-hander was in agony. Bieber called the pain at that point "debilitating." 

So after his first stinker of the season — a five-run, two-homer showing against Seattle in which his fastball velocity and curveball spin were both noticeably down — Cleveland put him on the injured list due to a muscle strain in his rotator cuff. The plan was two weeks, no throwing, after which point he would be reevaluated. 

"He didn't want to go on the IL," Francona told MLB.com at the time. "That's the kind of teammate he is. We said, ‘We want you to have a long, healthy career.' And we don't want him limping through it. That's not fair to him."

So onto the shelf went the ace with the bum arm. Shoulder injuries don't exactly have the rosiest history. In this game, it's better to get your elbow ligaments chopped up and stitched back together like a Thanksgiving turkey than it is to feel significant pain in your rotator cuff.

Thankfully for Bieber, he avoided going under the knife, his treatment instead filled with rest and physical therapy. For a guy who'd never missed time due to injury — not in college at UC-Santa Barbara, not in his brief minor-league career and not in the bigs — it was a rude awakening and a difficult transition.

"It was miserable, dude," Bieber told FOX Sports during Cleveland's off-day workout Thursday at Yankee Stadium. "I hated it."

Instead of recovering at the team's training complex in Arizona, Bieber opted to stay in Cleveland to remain around the team and "not lose the feeling." Despite the familiar surroundings, his first experience with rehab was much harder than he'd had anticipated.

"I couldn't wait to get healthy, so I could finally take a break," he said.

By September 2021, after grinding through months of rehab, Bieber finally felt healthy enough to pitch, and he made two pitch-count-limited starts at the end of the season. But even heading into spring training this year, Bieber knew he hadn't fully returned to his best. 

It took until mid-August, during a start on the road against the Blue Jays, for that feeling to completely return. And when it did, Bieber grabbed onto it, slicing and dicing in his final 10 starts for a 2.24 ERA in 68⅓ innings.

Bieber credits the time away from the mound with giving him some much-needed perspective. He'd gone from unknown fourth-round pick to Cy Young winner in a blink, and according to him, a little introspection went a long way. Nowadays, he's more thankful for the big-league life he leads, for the natural gifts he has been given and for the talent he has been able to cultivate. 

"Now, I always think to myself: How f---ing lucky am I?" he said about getting to play Major League Baseball. "This is the coolest thing ever."

If his recent bumps and deep breaths have truly given him a calmer, more measured presence, we'll see it against the Yankees on Friday in what's undoubtedly the biggest start of Bieber's life. He has faced New York in the playoffs once before, at an empty Progressive Field in the bizarre COVID Cup Round of 16. That night, Bieber got rocked, allowing seven earned on nine hits in just 4⅔ innings.

"I'd be lying to you if I said I didn't think about that [outing] for a while," he admitted. "But I truly believe I'm a different person and a different pitcher now, so I'm excited to take [Friday] as it comes."

Of course, you can't win a baseball game 0-0, no matter how hard the Guardians might try. Cleveland's success hinges on Bieber showing out Friday, but if the offense sleeps in, the team might lose anyway. 

As for Bieber, after spending so much time battling to recapture the fullest version of himself, he is shrinking his world, tunneling his perspective. The dude is just glad to be out there, thankful for the opportunity, stoked to be yet again pitching at his best.

Jake Mintz, the louder half of @CespedesBBQ is a baseball writer for FOX Sports. He’s an Orioles fan living in New York City, and thus, he leads a lonely existence most Octobers. If he’s not watching baseball, he’s almost certainly riding his bike. Follow him on Twitter @Jake_Mintz.