Gavin Williams has turned into must-watch appointment TV every fifth day, and Sunday against Arizona he was doing it again from pitch one. The Guardians right-hander opened by mowing down hitters early, and by the time Rob Friedman's PitchingNinja account was clipping strikeouts in the second inning, it was clear something special was building.
Williams punched out the side in the 2nd, part of a run that had him racking up strikeouts almost every frame.
It kept snowballing from there. Two more Ks in the third made it 6 through 3 innings, and a filthy 88 mph sweeper got him to 8 strikeouts through 4. By the fifth, Williams was sitting on 9 punchouts and had retired every D-backs hitter he'd faced — a perfect game, intact, deep into a start against a division-caliber lineup.
Williams recorded his 10th strikeout, pushing him to double digits before the perfect game even hit the sixth.
Williams had retired the first 15 Diamondbacks batters he faced, 9 of them by strikeout, when Tim Tawa stepped in to lead off the sixth. Tawa squared to bunt on an 0-1 pitch and fouled it off — then lined the next pitch to right field for a single, ending the perfect game bid. Guardians catcher Patrick Bailey and shortstop Brayan Rocchio were visibly unhappy with the bunt attempt, and manager Stephen Vogt came out of the dugout heated, gesturing toward the Arizona bench. Both teams gathered around home plate in a tense standoff just as Cleveland's grounds crew was rolling out the tarp for an incoming rain delay.
This is now the second time in a month a bunt has been the thing to break up a Williams gem. On July 9 against the Twins, Royce Lewis fouled off a bunt attempt with one out in the fifth during another perfect-game bid before eventually singling to end it. Bunting to break up a no-hitter or perfect game is one of baseball's oldest unwritten-rule flashpoints, and Cleveland's dugout clearly isn't interested in extending Williams that particular grace twice in one summer.
What makes all this land differently is the stretch Williams is on. Codify's numbers put it in historical context: 5 straight starts with 10-plus strikeouts is something only Shohei Ohtani has done in the past several seasons, and nobody had done it at all in 2023, 2024 or 2025 before Williams did it Sunday.
PitchingNinja later put a number on the whole run: 55 strikeouts against just 3 walks over Williams' last 5 starts, a ratio that borders on absurd for a pitcher who was already generating buzz on prop boards, with FanDuel bettors backing him for 7-plus strikeouts in this very outing before it was even thrown. Williams finished with 5 2/3 scoreless innings, and Cleveland avoided a sweep of the series. The perfect game is gone, but the strikeout streak — and apparently the target on his back from bunting attempts — is very much still alive.