CLEVELAND -- To say the Guardians needed a game like Saturday night would be a drastic understatement.

It wasn’t a win, it was a drubbing. It wasn’t a few lucky hits, it was squared-up, mashed baseballs. It wasn’t a dugout trying to hype each other up to fight back, it was like a group of rowdy school kids on a bus ride en route to a field trip. The Guardians put their recent struggles behind them and started fresh on Saturday, defeating the Rangers, 13-5, at Progressive Field.

With a Royals loss to the Phillies, the Guardians increased their lead in the AL Central to two games over both Kansas City and Minnesota.

“It was a fun night all around,” Guardians manager Stephen Vogt said. “The pitching was great. The offense was great. It was fun to put up some crooked numbers and then keep going.”

Everyone in the Guardians’ clubhouse knew that their recent struggles were going to end, they just didn’t know when. Each player wanted to be the guy who turned the offense around. Each pitcher felt the pressure to put up as many zeros as possible until the bats heated up. It eliminates the free-flowing, nonchalant approach they had to the game that made them so successful in the first few months of the season. They knew it would take effort to snap this stretch and that’s exactly what they got against the Rangers.

It started with Ben Lively, who had a 33-pitch first inning that put Cleveland in a 1-0 hole before he somehow gutted his way through 6 2/3 frames. But momentum started to build when the Guardians answered with a run to tie the game in the bottom of the first.

It continued with a three-hit performance from Jhonkensy Noel that included a Statcast-projected 405-foot, three-run homer and a 115.9 mph double. It escalated when Steven Kwan finally got back to his sparkplug ways by plating two runs in the second on a double that gave his team a two-run lead. It became an offensive frenzy when everyone in the starting lineup recorded at least one hit, aside from Brayan Rocchio, who instead drew two walks and scored two runs (and went first to third on a wild pitch).

“We had not scored in the first inning in quite some time,” Vogt said. “To answer back right away in the first I think released the pressure valve and then Kwanie’s double really just opened it up. And then Big Christmas, that was beautiful.”

But the win -- and the momentum shift back in the Guardians’ favor -- was solidified by the four homers that were launched. After Noel set the tone, José Ramírez and Josh Naylor went back to back and Bo Naylor added a solo shot of his own in the seventh.

The Guardians got their All-Star bats back. Now, they have to hope they stay hot. Kwan snapped out of his skid. Ramírez’s quiet week became loud in a hurry. And the elder Naylor found the answer to his 0-for-20 stretch: Kwan’s bat.

Before he went to the plate in the sixth, Naylor told Kwan he was going to use his bat in his next plate appearance. On the seventh pitch he saw, he sent the ball to the right-field seats.

“He’s like, ‘I’m gonna use your bat the next at-bat.’ I half didn’t even believe him,” Kwan said. "Then he hits that home run and it’s like oh, he knew what he was doing."

Maybe the Guardians just needed their All-Stars to get back into a rhythm. Maybe Naylor just needed to use Kwan’s bat. Whatever it is, the Guardians seem to believe the pressure valve has been released. If that’s the case, it may be happening at the right time, just before the second-place Royals come to town for a four-game series starting Monday.

“It’s easy to feel optimistic,” Kwan said. “Even the outs that we had were loud, barrel outs. It just feels like this is the one where it’s like, ‘OK, now here we go.’ … It just takes one hit, one barrel, one good at-bat for everyone to start clicking. Hitting is contagious. Can’t help but kind of feel good about what’s coming next.”