One game will decide the Guardians-White Sox series

The Cleveland Guardians and Chicago White Sox play one game Saturday night for a trip to the American League Championship Series. First pitch at Progressive Field is 8 p.m. Eastern. Four games are gone and nothing is settled. Read more: Guardians White Sox Game 5.

The road team has won every game of this series so far. The White Sox took both in Cleveland. The Guardians took both in Chicago. Now it swings back to Cleveland for the finale, and the pattern says the home crowd should expect to lose.

Cleveland forced this winner-take-all game Thursday, scoring six runs in the sixth inning to beat Chicago 9-5 in Game 4.

Both teams got here by grinding through September. The Guardians finished 85-77, good for first place in the AL Central by a single game over the 84-78 White Sox. Chicago actually won the regular-season series, 9-8 across 17 meetings. Saturday is the 22nd time these two teams have played this year, counting the postseason, and the only one that counts.

The pitching matchup

Chicago starts Sean Burke, 11-7 with a 3.34 ERA and 185 strikeouts this season. Cleveland counters with Gavin Williams, 14-8 with a 3.76 ERA and 248 strikeouts, second-most in the majors behind only Milwaukee's Jacob Misiorowski.

Burke has already beaten the Guardians once in this series. Working five and a third innings of relief in Game 2, he retired 13 batters in a row. He struck out six in a 4-3 win. Guardians manager Stephen Vogt had no complaints afterward. "Tip your cap to Burke," he said. "What an unbelievable performance for him."

Williams started that same Game 2, matching Burke pitch for pitch with 11 strikeouts over five innings. That was one strikeout shy of the Cleveland postseason record, set by Charles Nagy in 1996. He was already lined up to start Game 5 on normal rest. Instead he showed up Thursday, threw out of a big league bullpen for the first time in his career, and closed out Cleveland's 9-5 win in relief.

Related: Guardians force decisive game 5 against White Sox

He goes back to starting Saturday anyway, on two days' rest and an unusual workload behind him. "Gavin wants the ball," Vogt said. "We want him to have the ball, and it's his game."

The bats that could decide it

If it comes down to one swing, each team has a hitter capable of providing it. Cleveland's Jo Adell hit 23 home runs with a .401 slugging percentage this season and already has a bases-clearing triple in this series. Chicago's Munetaka Murakami, in his first big league season, led both rosters with 35 home runs and a .478 slugging mark.

Whoever wins this one boards a flight to Tampa Bay by Sunday morning, to face a Rays team that already swept the Yankees out of October. Whoever loses goes home for good.