Two Deadline Additions Are Now Day-to-Day. Cleveland Can't Afford Either.

Jo Adell had the best night of his Guardians tenure on Tuesday — a 455-foot, three-run homer, six RBIs, an 8-1 win over San Francisco — and then he left the game with an injury and is now day-to-day. That's the Guardians in August, in a sentence. Three days earlier I noted that Chase DeLauter's hamstring was the last thing this team needed. Now both of the outfielders driving Cleveland's offensive resurgence are sitting in the training room at the same time.

The timing matters because the offense had finally started to hold. Cleveland is scoring 4.3 runs per game over the last 10 games, up from 3.6 over the prior 20 — the first real evidence that the August 3 deadline additions were doing what the front office intended. Nathaniel Lowe is still healthy and producing, and José Ramírez is in the lineup, but DeLauter at .296/.392/.494 is the team's best hitter and Adell, volatile as his tenure has been, just put up a six-RBI night. Those are not easy absences to paper over with 34 games left and two games separating Cleveland from the last wild card spot.

Angel Martínez has quietly been one of the more productive bats in the lineup over a sustained stretch, and the depth exists to keep the lineup functional in the short term. But functional and sufficient are different things for a team at 61-67 that needs to play well above its season pace just to stay alive. The next 10 days will tell a lot about whether this stabilization was real or just a two-game sample against San Francisco.