Jerome Miron-Imagn Images

After building a 4 1/2-game lead just a few weeks ago, the Guardians (39-33) are now in a virtual tie with the upstart White Sox (38-32) atop the AL Central. As the two teams continue to battle for the division lead, however, the Guardians will have to do without their biggest star for the next several weeks. During Saturday’s 3-1 victory over the Tigers, José Ramírez fractured the hamate in his left hand, an injury that will require surgery and sideline him until some time after the All-Star break.

Ramírez suffered the injury during a fifth-inning plate appearance against Tarik Skubal, who was making his return from surgery to remove loose bodies in his elbow. According to manager Stephen Vogt, the slugger first felt the injury while swinging at a slider that he popped foul. He grounded out on the next pitch, and while he hoped to remain in the game because outfielders Angel Martínez and Chase DeLauter had already exited due to injuries, he was replaced by Daniel Schneemann — who had initially replaced DeLauter as a pinch-runner — at the start of the sixth inning.

“He tried to go back out,” said Vogt of Ramírez. “He knew the position we were in, grabbed his glove. He said, ‘Maybe I can at least play defense,’ and couldn’t squeeze his glove. [He] wanted to get back out there to help us win that game and just couldn’t.”

DeLauter collided with the right-center field wall on a Gleyber Torres double during the top of first inning. He remained in the game long enough to single off Skubal in the bottom of the frame, but exited in favor of Schneemann when he got to first base. He’s been diagnosed with a right rib contusion, and unlike Ramírez, he was not placed on the injured list prior to Sunday’s game (which was postponed due to rain). The team is still awaiting further evaluation of the CT and MRI scans he underwent after the game in order to rule out fractures and other internal injuries. The 24-year-old rookie right fielder has been dogged by numerous injuries since being taken in the first round in 2022. He’s currently hitting .263/.337/.408 (110 wRC+) with seven homers, including two on Opening Day, his regular season major league debut.

Martínez fouled Skubal’s first pitch of the game — his first pitch in the majors since returning from a six-week absence — off of his left foot. He grounded out on the next pitch, then gave way to Steven Kwan in left field in the top of the third. X-rays were negative and he was diagnosed with a left foot contusion. Vogt characterized him as having “a slight chance” of coming off the bench on Sunday if needed, while expressing hope that he would be available for the team’s next game, on Tuesday against the Brewers in Milwaukee. The 24-year-old outfielder is hitting .239/.276/.442 (97 wRC+), offsetting his 11 homers with just a 2.9% walk rate, the lowest of any American League qualifier.

The biggest blow is losing the 33-year-old Ramírez, who has long been one of the game’s most durable players. He had played in all 72 Guardians games this season and in more games since the start of the 2020 season (911) than all but three players: Matt Olson (935), Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and Pete Alonso (both 920). Over that span, his 35.1 WAR trails only Shohei Ohtani (49.3 including pitching), Aaron Judge (45.8), and Juan Soto (35.3). Coincidentally, the last time he landed on the injured list was when he suffered a fractured hamate in his right hand on August 24, 2019. He underwent surgery, returned in a month, and homered three times in the season’s final three games, but the 93-win Guardians just missed the playoffs. He’ll undergo surgery this time as well, with Vogt saying that the team expects him to miss five to seven weeks. Francisco Lindor and Corbin Carroll, to cite two of the recent high-profile examples of players who’ve suffered the same injury, both returned in about six weeks, playing on Opening Day after undergoing hamate surgeries on February 11.

Ramírez has not been at peak form thus far this season, hitting a comparatively modest .239/.339/.418 (109 wRC+) with 10 home runs and 24 stolen bases; the latter mark was tied with Bobby Witt Jr. for the league lead before Witt stole two bags on Sunday. That said, Ramírez had just started to heat up after a couple of uneven months, batting .295/.326/.523 (134 wRC+) with two homers in 11 games in June, after hitting .222/.341/.436 (114 wRC+) with six homers in March and April and then .234/.341/.355 (95 wRC+) with just two homers in May. Though he has hit for a 129 wRC+ from each side of the plate during his career, he had been struggling against righties thus far this season:

This year, Ramírez’s BABIP against righties is 70 points lower than against lefties, a similar margin to last year — but both sides have fallen more than 30 points relative to 2025. He’s shown far less power swinging from the left side, which isn’t surprising in general — he uses a shorter swing and doesn’t swing as hard from that side — but the gaps in terms of his bat speed and squared-up and blast rates (as percentages of swings) have become more pronounced:

Ramírez’s squared-up rates from both sides of the plate were very close together in 2024 and ’25, the two campaigns for which we have full-season data, but he’s fallen off considerably from the left-hand side this year, and similarly the spread between his blast rates from the two sides — which already favored the right-hand side — has grown. Comparing the progression of his exit velocities from each side of the plate, we can see that not only has his left-handed performance declined, he’s falling well short of his expected stats there, magnifying the difference:

Ramírez’s average exit velocity from the right side is almost eight miles per hour harder than the right, as opposed to the 2-3 mph range from the past two seasons.

On a positive note, one thing I had planned to write about at greater length is that even with his unspectacular start to his season, Ramírez has surpassed both Manny Machado and Nolan Arenado in the JAWS rankings at third base. Here’s how things stood in terms of bWAR at the end of last year, and how they stand after this past weekend, with an offseason park factor update incorporated as well:

With a typically stellar 2025 performance that included his third career 30-30 season (in this case 30 homers and 44 steals) as well as his third third-place finish in the AL MVP voting, Ramírez overtook Arenado, who is 17 months older, during the second half of September. Now he’s overtaken Machado, who’s just two months older and who is off to an absolutely dreadful start, and is just 0.1 points from tying Dick Allen for 17th in JAWS. All three active third basemen are still short of the career WAR and JAWS standards for Hall of Famers at the position, but I suspect they’ll wind up in Cooperstown some day. I do think that Ramírez, the least distinguished defender of the trio but the best hitter over the course of their careers, could further separate himself from the pack in the coming years.

Anyway, that’s a subject I’ll return to down the road. As for where the Guardians go from here, righty-swinging 26-year-old Gabriel Arias is likely to get the bulk of the playing time at third base in Ramírez’s absence, with Schneemann, a lefty-swinging 29-year-old utilityman, in the mix as well. On Sunday, the team activated Arias from the 60-day injured list, designating outfielder George Valera for assignment to make room for him on the roster. Arias began the season as the team’s regular shortstop before leaving Cleveland’s April 6 game against Kansas City due to a left hamstring strain. In his absence, Brayan Rocchio shifted from second base to shortstop, and a few weeks later, the team called up Travis Bazzana, the top pick of the 2024 draft, to handle second. Both have acquitted themselves well, with the 25-year-old Rocchio taking a big step forward at the plate from last year’s 77 wRC+, hitting .274/.353/.399 (114 wRC+), and the 23-year-old Bazzana batting .252/.345/.404 (110 wRC+).

Arias, who grazed our Top 100 Prospects list in 2022, has never hit much at the major league level. Last year, he put up a .220/.274/.363 line while setting career highs in plate appearances (471), homers (11), and WAR (1.1) as well as wRC+ (77), but that obviously isn’t saying much. While he hit the ball hard when he made contact — with a 90.3-mph average exit velocity and an 11.3% barrel rate — he struck out 34.4% of the time, his highest rate in his four major league seasons. He had struck out even more frequently (37.5%) through his first 32 plate appearances this year while batting .200/.250/.433 (86 wRC+). Schneemann, who has started 17 games at third base while Ramírez DHed, hasn’t hit much either (.229/.299/.363, 87 wRC+ with a 28.4% strikeout rate) and has posted a reverse platoon split in his three seasons (102 wRC+ vs. lefties, 81 vs. righties).

In other words, third base is a potential trouble spot for a team that’s only scoring 4.01 runs per game, in a virtual tie with the Rangers for the AL’s second-lowest rate. While the Guardians have six regulars with a 100 wRC+ or better in Ramírez, Bazzzana, DeLauter, Rocchio, Kyle Manzardo (105), and Rhys Hoskins (100), with part-timers David Fry (107), Austin Hedges (a career-best 99), and Martínez either at that level or not far off, Rocchio’s 114 wRC+ is the team’s highest rate, which is to say that there aren’t any big boppers to pick up the slack. Notably absent from that group is Kwan, who has hit just .215/.322/.263 (73 wRC+) while barreling just one ball, and even with the contributions of Hedges and Fry, the team’s catching corps — now led by the recently-acquired Patrick Bailey — has produced just a 69 wRC+. Ramírez should be back before the trade deadline, and with just five AL teams playing at a .500-or-better clip, the Guardians aren’t yet in real danger of missing out on a playoff spot, but if this team is going to be a real threat, the rest of Cleveland’s hitters are going to need to step up.