Detroit Tigers at Cleveland Guardians: Final Score & Recap

The Cleveland Guardians came back from a five-run early deficit to defeat the Detroit Tigers 7-6 at Progressive Field on June 14, 2026, in a game that swung dramatically before ending on a walk-off in the bottom of the ninth. Detroit jumped out to a commanding lead through the first three innings, scoring four runs in the first and one each in the second and third off Logan Allen to build a 6-1 advantage. Cleveland answered with a five-run fourth inning off Keider Montero that tied the game at six, and from that point the two clubs played scoreless baseball through the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth innings before Brayan Rocchio ended it with a home run off Drew Sommers in the bottom of the ninth.

Rocchio was the decisive figure in this contest by every measure DiamondIQ tracks. His walk-off home run in the ninth added 35.9 percentage points of win probability, the single largest swing of the game, and his two-run shot off Montero in the fourth had already added 28.2 percentage points during the comeback. Those two moments combined to give him a game-leading plus-49.0 percent WPA and a plus-3.2 RE24, the most impactful individual performance on either side. His flyout in the second inning off Montero had briefly cost Cleveland 12.8 percentage points, a reminder of how tightly the game's momentum was contested in the middle innings. Dillon Dingler contributed a groundout in the second that added 9.8 percentage points from the Cleveland perspective, finishing with a plus-12.5 percent WPA, while Chase DeLauter posted a plus-7.7 percent WPA to round out Cleveland's top offensive contributors.

On the mound, the Guardians bullpen shouldered the burden of protecting a tie game across multiple scoreless innings. Erik Sabrowski led Cleveland pitchers with plus-18.9 percent WPA, with Cade Smith and Tyler Kinley each adding plus-13.5 percent WPA. Smith secured the final out of the ninth inning on a Kevin McGonigle strikeout, a play that added 10.9 percentage points to Cleveland's win probability heading into the walk-off frame. The DiamondIQ model had opened the game favoring Cleveland at 59 percent and closed at 100 percent following Rocchio's decisive blow, a fitting endpoint for a game that spent most of its middle innings in a genuine deadlock after Detroit's early dominance had briefly made the outcome look far less uncertain.