The 2022 Cleveland Guardians should be considered the best defensive squad in franchise history

Four Cleveland Guardians have won the Gold Glove and that’s a first for the franchise.

The Cleveland Guardians have had a season to remember for 2022. The team is riding high and doing great work as a whole. The future is bright and the offseason could see the team get even better, assuming the fanbase showed up enough to help raise the payroll.

While we wait to see how things shake out after the World Series, the postseason award season has begun in earnest. We don’t know the Silver Sluggers as of press time, the Cy Young, Rookie of the Year, or MVP have yet to be decided as well, but we do know the Gold Glove winners.

The Guardians went four for five in that area, with Shane Bieber, Steven Kwan, Andres Gimenez, and Myles Straw all winning the AL Gold Glove award for their respective position. The only player who didn’t win the award was Jose Ramirez.

All four men earned their first Gold Gloves, with Straw and Kwan also earning a nod for the best defensive outfielders via the Fielding Bible Award.

The Cleveland Guardians four-some is in rarified air

The last time the Guardians set the franchise record for most Gold Glove wins came in 2000, when Roberto Alomar, Travis Fryman, and Omar Vizquel won the award at second, third, and shortstop respectively.

While the reputations of Alomar and Vizquel have hit the wall in recent years due to their antics and misbehavior, Fryman at least still looks like a decent human being. So there’s at least one name we can look back on fondly.

The legacy-tarnishing actions of Vizquel and Alomar have made it fair to look at the current crop of Guardians players and acknowledge them as the best defensive class in team history. To be clear, I’m merely saying the 2022 Guards were better defensively than the 2000 squad, not that Vizquel and Alomar are somehow worse than Gimenez.

They may be scumbags, but Alomar and Vizquel are still among the greatest defensive players of all time.

The Guardians’ defense was a key reason why 2022 was so good, and when talking about improvements to the team, namely at catcher, realizing how vital defense is in searching for a potential replacement to Austin Hedges, has to be on the front of everyone’s mind. A great defensive player can really make an impact.