WS Game Three: The fifth-inning dimension

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Christian Yelich

Sliding Scale Dept: Christian Yelich holding onto second base for dear life, upheld safe on review and opening the door to the eight-run fifth inning flood. (Fox Sports capture.)

Until Monday night, 88 meant the number of piano keys over which distinguished hands danced. Hands such as those belonging to Dave Brubeck, Philippe Entremont, Red Garland, Herbie Hancock, Vladimir Horowitz, Oscar Peterson, Bud Powell, and Professor Longhair.

On Monday night, in Tropicana Field, they meant eight Brewers runs on eight Brewers hits in a single fifth inning during World Series Game Three, which ended in a 10-1 massacre leaving the formerly perky, plucky, pesky Rays on the ropes. And, possibly, at the end of their ropes.

All courtesy of such now- or long-distinguished hands on bats as Jackson Chourio, Christian Yelich, William Contreras, Brice Turang, Cameron Mitchell, Cooper Pratt, Sal Frelick, and David Hamilton.

And, in Yelich’s case, maybe the single most powerful walk of all time.

And, the Brewers accomplished something unseen in no World Series before Monday night. All eight of those runs came home on two outs. Turning a mere 2-0 Brewers lead entering the frame into a 10-1 burial in which the lone Rays run—an RBI double with two outs in the bottom of the ninth—seemed like a pardon-us show of lingering life.

In what may yet prove to be the understatement of the postseason, Rays manager Kevin Cash was asked about that fifth. He knew it was the inning upon which everyone may yet look back and think it was the inning above all that sealed the Rays’s fate.

“It’s definitely deflating,” Cash said at his postgame presser. “How could it not be?”

Charles Cornwallis telling that to his soldiers before surrendering to George Washington at the Seige of Yorktown couldn’t have been more understated.

There’s still a fourth game to play at minimum. If the Rays have heretofore undetected cards to play and powers upon which to draw, they’d better play them and draw upon them Tuesday night.

In a Series matching two teams who play small-to-medium ball the way the aforementioned Garland played the blues, the Brewers are making the Rays resemble students who’ve barely gotten through the semester’s opening days.

This time, the Brewers didn’t have to strike from a deficit. This time, there was no early Rays scoring to prompt them to think, They have us right where we want them. This time, Yelich and Contreras staked them to a 2-0 lead with back-to-back RBI singles in the top of the third. For the first time in this World Series, they had an early lead to defend entering their half of the fifth.

Two RBI singles wasn’t supposed to turn Rays starter Freddy Peralta into an emergency ward patient. But then came Yelich, whose ages-ago acquisition from the Marlins could be argued as the moment the Brewers began returning to competitiveness and slouching toward greatness.

This time, it wasn’t a big stick but a big eye. He worked his way back from 1-2 to three straight takes out of the upper strike zone with Chourio (one-out single, stolen base) on second and two outs.

Then Contreras squeaked one toward third. Rays third baseman Junior Caminero picked it with his running momentum tugging him more toward the outfield. He threw to second instead of going for the theoretically simpler out at first. Second baseman Ben Williamson took the throw as Yelich’s right, front foot hit the pad about a half-inch ahead of the ball hitting Williamson’s glove.

Unlike Rays left fielder Chandler Simpson, caught stealing when he slid just past the pad to end the bottom of the first, Yelich never let his foot or his leg leave the pad behind.

The replays confirmed it. The Brewers now had the bases loaded and two outs. Cash took no chances with a parade of mostly portside swingers in the offing. He brought lefthander Cam Booser in. Before this, Booser was one of the Rays’s least touchable pen men and nobody in this postseason could claim an earned run off him. Yet.

But Turang shot one right off the glove of Rays shortstop Taylor Walls to shoot Chourio and Yelich home. Mitchell shot one the other way to left for the single that sent Contreras home. Pratt interrupted the left-side parade by pulling one off Caminero’s glove for a two-run double. Frelick—who’s hit the lone Brewers home run of the set, and who was robbed of an extra-base RBI hit in the second by a spectacular Simpson running catch—so went the other way to left, doubling Pratt home.

Robert Gasser

Robert Gasser—How to make like Sandy Koufax and be almost ignored in six easy lessons . . .

Booser couldn’t have been blamed if he reached for a double shot of booze after coming out in favour of righthander Cole Sulser. After Hamilton singled Frelick home and Chourio doubled Hamilton home—the fourth hit of the night just for the Brewers left fielder alone—first baseman Jake Bauers flied out to left. Almost the way he’d done to make the last known Brewers out before the battering rams started battering.

Almost lost in the superlatives that followed to describe and analyse the Brewers’s fifth inning flogging was their starting pitcher Robert Gasser. His repertoire doesn’t exactly match his name, since he makes his living offering diets of breaking balls and off-speed stuff for the most part.

He only pitched six shutout innings in which he collaborated with the fielders behind him the way Brubeck once collaborated with his classic quartet. He pitched them facing the minimum eighteen batters over the six. The last lefthander to do that? Some ancient Hall of Famer named Sandy Koufax, in 1965. In any other World Series, that would have been headlines upon headlines atop headlines.

But who the hell needed Gasser this night? Or, his relief Antonio Senzatella, who fired two perfect innings of his own? Only one Brewers pitcher could have taken minds off that assault-and-battery fifth. That was the guy who hadn’t pitched since the Fourth of July and recovered quicker than expected from shoulder capsule surgery to make this Series roster.

The guy who’s been a Brewer for life and interrupted more rudely by injuries than hecklers dare to interrupt comedians. The guy Brewers manager Pat Murphy—who spent much of the late game wheeling his supporting cast into and out of the game just to let them have a Series taste—sent out to pitch the ninth.

Brandon Woodward wrung his way around that excuse-us Rays run—a one-out single (pinch hitter Cedric Mullins); a two-out RBI double (Yandy Díaz)—to lure Jonathan Aranda into a first-pitch, game-ending ground out to second.

Only these Brewers could take that kind of game with that kind of fifth-inning bloodletting and make it into a feel-good game in the end. The looks on Woodward’s face after Turang threw Aranda out were the kind you borrow for feel-good product advertisements. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy than the one who threw the National League’s only 2023 pitching shutout, missed 2024, a piece of 2025, and two-thirds of 2026 with shoulder trouble.

Woodruff was first penciled in to start Game Four. But with the Brewers enjoying a glandular lead and Murphy unwilling to stop handing out favours, he asked Woodruff if he wanted that or to have the Game Three ninth.

“I want it right now,” the Forever Brewer (as he’s known around the Brewers and the game) said.

He could have been giving the entire team a watchword for the rest of the Series. A rest of the Series that could end Tuesday night. A rest of the Series in a stadium where almost precisely half the crowd was traveling, racket-making Brewers fans for whom travel and the Trop were cheaper than too many of the American Family Field Series tickets.

We want it right now, the Brewers will think as they begin Game Four. As the Rays begin, they’ll want to sing, You can’t always get what you want. That may not be simple the night after a journey to the fifth inning dimension.

WS Game Two: The Brewers—“They had us right where we wanted them”

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Sal Frelick

Sal Frelick hitting the first Brewers World Series home run since Ben Oglivie 16,075 days previous . . . (Fox Sports capture.)

Not even the mild controversy of Game Two’s final strike could erase what’s becoming a theme for these postseason Brewers. They won’t let any deficit keep them from the steady but certain completion of their self-appointed rounds.

Jump them with a little help from one of their own mistakes for four runs in the first, the way the Rays did Saturday night? The Brewers just look, listen, and think, They have us right where we want them.

Pry two right back out of the Rays’s ace Drew Rasmussen in the bottom of the inning, but leave first and third and let Rasmussen settle in for one of his usual outings? They have us right where we want them.

Sneak a third run in the fourth on a ball sneaking through Rays first baseman Jonathan Aranda’s legs with first and third and one out? They have us right where we want them.

Stay a run behind opening the bottom of the sixth, watch right fielder Sal Frelick wring his way to a full-count ninth pitch off Rays reliever Ian Seymour? They have us right where we want them. Watch Frelick homer on that pitch? They had us right where we wanted them.

Because that’s just the Brewers, too.

And that was about a week after they fell behind 4-0 to the Damndodgers in National League Championship Series Game Four. A deficit that included a still-ailing Shohei Ohtani finding enough of a power reserve to hit a three-run homer measured not in distance but on the Richter scale.

They had us right where we wanted them, too. And—a two-run single in the fourth, an RBI single and a bases-loaded game-tying walk in the fifth, a leadoff homer in the sixth, and a two-out homer in the ninth later, the Brewers finished the pennant sweep they started.

Now, with a 5-4 Game Two win in the World Series, the Brewers look unsinkable and the Rays look half sunk. Beware how deceptive looks can be. Remind yourself there’s still time for the Rays to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, say to themselves, They have us right where we want them, too.

They can make the Brewers suffer in the Trop, a pressure cooker of a dome equal to American Family Field’s roof closure for a racket down from the stands. They can force the Series back to Milwaukee with those comeback kids needing yet another comeback. Or two.

Can’t they?

Who knows? It’s not looking great for the Rays after Rasmussen—who hadn’t allowed three or more runs in his previous thirty-six innings of work—got pried for three runs in three and two-thirds innings Saturday night.

It’s not looking great for the Rays after their bullpen, the fifth-best in the American League on the regular season, couldn’t even think about getting Games One and Two to their lights-out ninth-inning man Bryan Baker.

It’s not looking great for the Rays after Frelick fought Seymour through eight pitches most of which Frelick admitted later enabled less-than-comfortable swings, then got what he wanted on the ninth pitch, a sinker right down Main Street—and hit it on a high line over the center field fence. For the first World Series home run any Brewer has hit in 16,075 days. (The last: Ben Oglivie, fifth inning, 1982 Game Seven, off the Cardinals’s Joaquín Andújar.)

It’s not looking great for the Rays after rookie Brewers shortstop Cooper Pratt—who enabled their early lead in the first place by throwing Yandy Díaz’s game-opening grounder away—atoned for that with second baseman Brice Turang on third (leadoff double; advance on a fly out) when he lined a single into shallow right field, letting Turang score the fifth Brewers run without a sweat.

It’s not looking good for the Rays when they’re up against a Brewers bullpen that has a 1.24 ERA this entire postseason while their own pen minus Baker has a 4.20.

And, when they’re up against an Aaron Ashby who isn’t the Brewers’s designated closer but has a zero ERA and a 1.24 fielding-independent pitching rate over three and a third Series innings so far. Not to mention 15.2 scoreless innings to start his entire postseason, a third of an inning shy of the record sixteen Cleveland’s Andrew Miller set in 2016. Over that 15.2? Five hits, three walks, seventeen punchouts.

There was Ashby on the mound with Díaz at the plate and the Rays down to their final out Saturday night. There was Ashby in the hold 3-1 to the dangerous enough Díaz. There was Brewers catcher William Contreras calling for and getting a curve ball that froze Díaz like a turkey awaiting its Thanksgiving dinner thaw. There was Contreras calling for a second straight curve, Ashby throwing it down and in, Díaz unable to keep from swinging.

The Rays’s designated hitter tried to check the swing. An appeal to first base rung him up with the game-ending out. The swing looked so bloody close on replays—the general rule is that if the bat head passes the front of the plate, it’s a swing and a strike, though Díaz’s bat head was so close the call could have gone either way.

If it had been ruled check swing, ball four, it would have meant Aranda batting with first and third and two out. Aranda had one double that came to naught on the night, but he’d gone 3-for-3 with a run scored in Game One. He wouldn’t exactly have been easy meat, even for Ashby.

But rest assured. If it did happen that way, Ashby and the Brewers would have given themselves a quick review, looked at Aranda checking in, and thought to themselves, yet again: They have us right where we want them.

Beware. The Rays had 98 comeback wins on the regular season to the Brewers having a mere 34. But the Brewers have done it seven times this postseason—including four straight to the Damndodgers—to the Rays doing it nada.

Other than the change of venue, and even with rejuvenated Freddy Peralta scheduled to start Game Three, the Rays can’t yet look at the Brewers and think, They have us right where we want them.

WS Game One: “Just get the outs”

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As closer Trevor Megill (right) takes an ump up on some extra keep-loose tosses, Brewers shortstop Cooper Pratt watches a replay of the double play that wasn’t, compelling Megill to go after and punch out Rays center fielder Jonny DeLuca to end the Brewers’ World Series-opening win Friday night. (Fox Sports capture.)

Opening night for Les Mis in the World Series wasn’t exactly one for award consideration. It didn’t have to be. The company around him was more than able to save the show when he had an off night. An off night for him, not anyone else.

Jacob Misorowski with a five-inning line of three punchouts, four hits, one earned run, and a 2.50 fielding-independent pitching rate is an off night for the likely National League Cy Young Award winner whose regular season showed a 174.2-inning line of 252 punchouts,  a 2.17 FIP, and a 1.80 earned run average.

But it was enough to keep his Brewers in the game until manager Pat Murphy decided it was time to reach for the secondary cast. Abner Uribe and Aaron Ashby made life difficult enough for the Rays, before Trevor Megill made it almost interesting enough for the Rays to overthrow the Brewers

Emphasis on almost.

The not-even-close-to-artificially-intelligent Brewers and not-even-close-to-artificially-intelligent Rays played it tight, overcame mistakes, and ground it out until the final outs that weren’t, before the Brewers held on tight to their 3-2 Game One win.

They had William Contreras to thank for a lot of it, their defense for a lot of it, the bullpen for a lot of the rest of it, and the replay review for the next-to-last act.

First, Contreras repaid longtime franchise face Christian Yelich for that bottom of the first RBI triple that just did elude diving Rays center fielder Jonny DeLuca. He slashed the first pitch he saw from Rays starter Nick Martinez through the hole at shortstop to send Yelich home and the Brewers to a nice, early 2-0 lead.

Then, with one out and Rays first baseman Jonathan Aranda (base hit) aboard in the sixth, Contreras caught Uribe’s swinging strikeout pitch to Rays left fielder Chandler Simpson and whipped a textbook perfect strike up the pipe to nail Aranda trying to swipe second.

Martinez, the elder Rays righthander who has a between-pitches habit of stepping up and down as though he’s peeking over a fence waiting for the right time to leap over and rob the place, settled well from there. He justified Rays manager Kevin Cash holding his own ace Drew Rasmussen until Game Two.

With the benefit of a run-scoring ground out by Liam Hicks in the top of the fourth to cut that lead in half, Martinez had his way with the Brewers for the most part the rest of his assignment.

He got away with Brewers right fielder Sal Frelick singling with one out in the second and helping himself to third after being bunted to second when he struck left fielder Jackson Chourio out to end the second.

He got away with murder in the fifth because Brewers third baseman David Hamilton took a bad turn rounding second trying to turn his one-out double into a triple, and the relay from right fielder Victor Mesa, Jr. to second baseman Ben Williamson to third baseman Junior Caminero was flawless enough to nail the diving Hamilton by a full foot plus.

Did that knock the Brewers into the oxygen tent?

Not a chance. Veteran Steven Matz—last seen in the World Series as a rookie with the 2015 Mets—shook off a pair of two-out walks in the sixth to escape and landed a pair of seventh-inning outs following a leadoff walk to Brewers rookie shortstop Cooper Pratt. Cash lifted Matz for Kevin Kelly, wanting the right-on-right match with Chourio.

Right on, the Brewers thought, when Chourio punched Pratt home with a base hit through the right side.

Naturally, things had to get more than interesting in the top of the ninth. As in, Brewers closer Trevor Megill allowing a pair of base hits (Aranda and Simpson) and a double steal, then walking the bases loaded for Hicks. Those hoping the Brewers might find their own Mariano Rivera some day had to settle for finding their own Craig Kimbrel Friday night.

Heaven help Megill if his mojo stops working. So far, he can work his way out of trouble of his own making faster than you can say “kill the save.” And he won’t say no to any help he can get. He got it Friday night, from Hicks and from his infield and from New York.

As in, Hicks grounding into what looked like a bang-bang-bang double play. As in, Caminero looking out at second, Hicks called out at first, and the Rays calling for a review. Megill wasn’t sure why. He may have been the only human being in American Family Field who wasn’t sure. At first. Then . . .

“I thought they were challenging the play at first,” he told reporters postgame. “I didn’t even think about it. I thought my cleat was dragging across the base. I just kind of looked at one of the umpires there and said, ‘Hey, what are you hearing in your ear?’ He said, ‘Uh, whatever, not too good. Do you want to throw some baseballs?”

The extra tosses did Megill a huge favour after replays showed Pratt covering second came off the pad before he had the ball to record the out while his throw on to first got Hicks. Meaning pinch runner Jorge Mateo was safe at home with the second Rays run and DeLuca checking in at the plate.

Once upon a time, that double play would have stood. It used to be called the infamous neighbourhood play. The out at second would be called if the fielder happened to be in the neighbourhood whether or not his foot hit the pad before he threw on. The crackdown on that play started around 2016. Bye, neighbour.

This was a night both sides didn’t exactly look like virtuosi on the bases, either. Now, though, Megill was hell bent on just blowing DeLuca away with two men still in scoring position. He dropped to 2-1 on fastballs, then dropped a delicious curve in on DeLuca to freeze him for strike two. 

“Anytime you can land a curveball at the bottom right there like that,” the husky righthander said, “it definitely sets up your next one. It’s just pitching and trusting what William is putting down back there.”

Contreras wanted that curve again. Megill was only too happy to oblige. He threw it, DeLuca swung through it, and the game belonged to the Brewers.

That’s not exactly what the Rays want to hear. This postseason, just the bullpen trinity of Uribe, Ashby, and Megill have a combined 0.95 earned run average, even if Megill likes to do it the hard way a little too often. Not the best pickings for a Rays team that was the American League’s best on the season but went 0-for-6 with men in scoring position Friday night.

“Has any team won a World Series with a starting rotation that was mostly just the nightly warm-up act for its bat-smothering relief crew?” asked The Athletic‘s Jayson Stark. “This is not a rhetorical question anymore.”

Megill had a non-rhetorical answer. “I don’t know, man. It just don’t matter how we get the outs,” he told Stark. “Just get the outs.”

Just get the outs. Because, as Yelich himself said postgame, “All of these games are going to be close. But it was good to get that first one.” Especially when it took forty-four years to get another crack at it.

The Guardians aren’t out of it until . . .

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Yandy DîazYou’ve been warned. The Rays are going to win the American League Championship Series. Why? Because Yandy Diaz says so, that’s why.

“It all ends tomorrow,” Díaz said, after the Rays hung on to win Game Five, 3-1, in Progressive Field Sunday. “We’re going to win tomorrow.”

His two-run homer in Game Four and his 3-for-5 performance in Game Five give him some psychological leverage.

But unless you’re a spit, scuff, mud, or scratchballer living rent free in opposing hitters’s heads (good afternoon, Hall of Famers Whitey Ford and Gaylord Perry), or a road runner living likewise before you reach base in the first place (likewise, Hall of Famers Luis Aparicio and Rickey Henderson), it’s not advisable to play the psych-out card.

More often than not, that card becomes bulletin board stuff. The kind that irons the other guys up. Ask David Cone. He’s the Mets pitcher who called Dodgers reliever Jay Howell “a high school pitcher” in a ghostwritten newspaper before Game Two of the 1988 National League Championship Series. Oops.

Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda posted the column on their clubhouse bulletin board. Guess who turned up as the Mets’s Game Two starter. Guess who got beaten like a piñata for five runs in two innings? Guess who ended up losing the pennant in seven games, before the Dodgers went on to bury the Bash Brothers Athletics in five in the World Series?

Díaz might want to beware.

Assume the Guardians have no intention of going home before getting to play a seventh ALCS game, even in Tampa. They didn’t play terribly in Game Five. They did everything they could short of having the Rays’s pitchers on the day kidnapped, and got only one run on a ground ball for their trouble.

Predicting victory the day after you take a 3-2 series advantage isn’t always a safe prediction. The combatants who predict their outcomes are never really safe. Joe Namath remains among the outliers.

Sonny Liston once predicted he’d flatten an upstart kid known then as Cassius Clay early, often, and permanently. (I don’t think it’ll go past two. It better not go past three.) He got out-thought most of the fight, then got so out-boxed in the sixth round that he couldn’t answer the bell for the seventh.

Jack Kent Cooke was a very confident Los Angeles Lakers owner before Game Seven of the 19679 NBA finals. Confidence is good. Unless it compels you to order championship balloons suspended from the L.A. Forum rafters in advance. And, to order flyers on the Forum’s seats saying what would happen when the Lakers won.

Somebody forgot to tell Bill Russell and his Boston Celtics. Ruh-roh. Nobody needed to tell him or them. The furious Celtics ended up upsetting the Lakers by two points.

Eat Your Vegetables, Not Your Children Dept.—Remember Mike Tyson saying he’d eat Lennox Lewis’s children? Now, remember Lewis having Tyson for lunch in the eighth round?

You can assume Seattle fans still haven’t forgiven Seahawks quarterback Matt Hasselback for his 2003 NFL wild card game overtime-opening faux pas after winning the coin toss. He took the ref’s microphone and purred, for all to hear, “We want the ball, and we’re gonna score.”

Green Bay Packers cornerback Al Harris responded, “That’s what you think.” Hasselbeck’s pick-six throw ended up in Green’s hands. Green ended up going 52 yards for the win. The only Seahawks comfort was the Packers being stopped in overtime by the Philadelphia Eagles in the divisional round.

Now, you can’t really fault Díaz for feeling a little overconfident. The Rays did tie with the National League pennant-winning Brewers for the Show’s best home record this year. The Guards had the sixth-best road record. The Rays get to throw Freddy Peralta—the former Brewer, the guy who deflated as a Met before he was re-inflated as a Ray—out to start Game Six. The Guards are all but forced to go to a bullpen Game Six.

They’ve been there, done that, time enough and again enough. Their skipper Stephen Vogt isn’t exactly worried, about Díaz’s confidence or anything else the Rays might dream up for the Guards bulletin board.

“We don’t have another choice,” Vogt told MLB.com’s Adam Berry. “We don’t like being in this position, but, like we said the last series, our backs were against the wall. They’ve been against the wall for a long time. This is when this team thrives.”

The Guards were one win away from early winter vacation in their division series against the feel-better White Sox. Then they out-scored the Pope Sox 20-8 and swept the next three. Pope, schmope, listen to a yogi: the Guards aren’t out of it until they’re out of it. Even Díaz knows it.

“We know we’ve got our work cut out for us,” Vogt went on. “It’s a really good team, and a really good team when they play at home, especially. So we know this is going to be tough, but if there’s a group I’m betting on to get this done, it’s our guys.”

They’ll have to. They didn’t look like their usual contact-hitting, brainy-baserunning, timely-swinging selves on Sunday. Sure, their lone run came on a mid-game ground out. But they’ve scored only four runs since Petey Halpin’s Game Three two-run homer and beyond-epic bat flip off it.

The Guards will open with Shawn Armstrong, a reliever who was so-so on the season but who’s been wonderful world this postseason so far. (1.51 fielding-independent pitching; 4.5 K/9, no walks, in 7.2 innings including four in the ALCS.) It’s a risk since he’s appeared in three games this ALCS, and they’ll have to find a way through Peralta.

And, through Díaz’s pronouncement of their death.

A special, cool little story

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Milwaukee Brewers

Center fielder Garrett Mitchell, catcher William Contreras, and more celebrate the Brewers’s first pennant since 1982—when they were in the American League. (Fox Sports capture.)

Whatever else you can accuse Dodgers manager Dave Roberts of thinking, you can’t impeach his simple, to the point valedictory after his team got hunted, pecked, bumped, flecked, and shoved out of their World Series three-peat hopes: “At the end of the day, we got beat. We got outplayed in all facets.”

That tells two things. The story of this National League Championship Series, and only half the story of what the Brewers sweep really signifies. What’s the other half, you wondered Thursday night, while watching the Brewers do just one of many things they’ve done like virtuosi this week.

“What Major League Baseball doesn’t want to discuss, as it portrays its sport as a broken landscape of haves and have-nots,” says The Athletic‘s Ken Rosenthal, who doubles as a Fox Sports television analyst, “is that big-money teams can sustain success only for a finite period, if they achieve success at all.”

Bleat to your heart’s content that these Dodgers are as imperious and intolerable as the early-to-mid 20th century Yankees. The mighty do fall, and get felled, and more often than you think. And, as often as not, they get felled as this year’s Dodger’s did.

Not by the edicts of a commissioner who’s six parts snake oilman and half a dozen parts Rube Goldberg and thinks the good of the game is nothing more than making money for it. Not by the owners who think they should be making money regardless of whether they care about their on-field product.

They get felled between the lines, at the plate, on the mound, out of the bullpen.

The beauties of baseball include that the moment the umpire hollers, “Play ball,” all arguments for salary caps and against salary floors disappear faster than the Dodgers did in this year’s National League Championship Series. The game that’s played is the game that counts.

“They may have a bunch of Hall of Famers,” said Brewers manager Pat Murphy, “but we’ve got a bunch of gamers. And the gamers won this week.”

The Brewers weren’t disrespectful so much as they couldn’t have cared less how many Hall of Famers wore Dodger uniforms or how many dollars each Dodger puts in the bank every week. They cared about runs on the scoreboard and couldn’t have cared less who put them there first.

The Damndodgers (yes, people still say it as one word, ladies and gentlemen) scored first in three out of the four NLCS games and led in all four of them. And they still got swept. By the team they swept out of last year’s NLCS. The only previous time that ever happened was never.

What nobody likes to remember or admit about the Damndodgers is that it. is. not. just. the salaries they’re willing to pay their players that made them winners of thirteen out of fourteen straight National League West titles and defending back-to-back World Series champions.

What a lot of those harrumphers didn’t like to remember or admit, while going in believing the Brewers would be just the latest upstarts ground beneath the Dodger boot heel, is that the teams are an even match where it matters most before the game begins. The Dodgers think well, develop well, coach well, teach well, and analyse well, as well as play well. The Brewers, who had baseball’s best record winning this year’s NL Central, think, develop, coach, teach, and analyse likewise.

But these Brewers did in a Dodger team that was a lot more vulnerable than its enemies wanted to hear. Sentence the Damndodgers to the seventh circle of hell if you must. But you must also be fair and remember that they got within the proverbial cat’s whisker of losing last year’s World Series. (Remember? They never led Game Seven until the eleventh inning.) And, that their age might be catching up to them at last.

So Shohei Ohtani finally found his way through his health issues to crank a three-run homer with two outs in the Game Four bottom of the second, giving his Dodgers a 4-0 lead? Let him have his fun.

Concurrently, ask yourselves just why the Dodgers didn’t insist on Ohtani hitting the injured list for proper healing of his knee and his biceps down the stretch. In thirty-two postseason plate appearances this time around, that homer was the only one of his five hits to mean extra bases.

What Ohtani really did, though, was give the Brewers an 0-4 lead. You’d have seen that if you paid close enough attention. You’d have seen the Brewers one and all watching Ohtani round the bases behind the two aboard in front of him and thinking, They have us right where we want them.

A one-out walk (to second baseman Brice Turang) and a ground rule double (by catcher William Contreras) set the top of the fourth table for NLCS Most Valuable Player Jake Bauers. And the first baseman rapped a ground rule double immediately, cutting the deficit in half. One inning later, third baseman David Hamilton singled right fielder Sal Frelick home, compelling Roberts to lift his starter Tyler Glasnow and bring Evan Phillips in.

Phillips proved the gift that kept on giving. He got Jackson Chourio to line out, but he walked the bases loaded before coming out in favour of Alex Vesia. And Bauers wrung Vesia for a four-pitch, game-tying walk. One inning after that, with Dodger closer Tanner Scott in a little bit earlier than normal but the Dodger season on the line—he fought center fielder Garret Mitchell to a full count, before Mitchell sent one over the center field fence.

David Hamilton, Edwin Díaz

David Hamilton, half a second from turning Edwin Díaz’s service into Brewers insurance Friday night.

The Brewers—those patient souls who blend small, medium, and large ball with the fine hands of the brewers who once made Milwaukee famous, and shake off their occasional mistakes and malfunctions—must have been the only ones in Dodger Stadium who thought their 5-4 lead was safe.

“Man,” marveled another Athletic writer, Levi Weaver, who usually covers the Rangers for the journal. “The Brewers just straight-up absorbed the momentum-shifting mega-moment from Ohtani. They took the blow, calmly stood back up, and just kept hammering away at the load-bearing walls of the dynasty. Two runs in the fourth, two more in the fifth, one (so far) in the sixth. Absolutely unflappable.”

However much the Dodgers’s age showed, however creaky one or two parts must have been, these were still the Dodgers. They were still capable of undoing the Brewers to play another day. Weren’t they?

Not this time. Not even when the Dodgers turned to Edwin Díaz, their glandular off-season free agency relief signing, who missed too much time with injuries, didn’t pitch too well when he could pitch on the season, and hadn’t yet poked his nose out of his postseason mouse hole—and Díaz recorded a possibly unexpected* eight straight outs into the top of the ninth.

Leave it to Hamilton to spoil Díaz’s splendid turn with a flog into the right field seats. Just call him Liberty Mutual. (The insurer shares the Brewers’s team colours.) But if you dare send Limu Emu out to follow him around the bases, we’re going to fight.

Brewers reliever Aaron Ashby saw and raised Díaz. He took six straight outs into the bottom of the ninth. Then, he finished what he started. Tommy Edman, pinch hitting for veteran Dodgers third baseman Max Muncy? Full-count ground out.

Center fielder Andy Pages, one of last year’s World Series heroes, the guy who’d run over his grandmother, grandfather, and teammate to catch the would-be-Series-winning Blue Jays extra-base hit? Looking at strike three.

Utility expert Enrique Hernández, said teammate, he of a duffel bag full of postseason heroics in years previous? A hard, high liner to left center field run down by Jackson Chourio for the NLCS-ending final out.

And, just like that, the Damndodgers—baseball’s bogeymen, the team denigrated as everything wrong with the sport in dollar terms by those ignorant of everything else they did right for so long—lost the pennant.

To a team whose dollar endowments might not be even halfway toward the Dodgers’s bucks but whose brains, teaching, analytics, and development sent them to the postseason in eight out of veteran Christian Yelich’s nine Brewers seasons.

“We believe in ourselves,” said Yelich postgame. “We didn’t just, like, wake up and find ourselves here. We expected to be a team that was in this position and have this opportunity. We didn’t feel like this was unexpected or a special, cool, little story.”

When you win the pennant and become the second modern (post-1900) Show team to win one in each league (the first: the Astros), you can afford to come up short in the rhetoric department.

Except that it is a special, cool story.

Commissioner Pepperwinkle and his merry band of salary cappers. The lamer owners who refuse as opposed to being unable to deliver reasonably competitive baseball teams, making the sport a game of wills and will nots, not haves and have nots. The ignorant fan and media cadres who buy their Kickapoo Joy Juice at full price. They’re all witless to understand.

The only postseason team more fun than these Brewers are those well-oiled, well-constructed, well-instructed, exuberantly fun Guardians. They have a 2-1 ALCS lead over the well-oiled, well-constructed, well-instructed, as-much-fun-as-glue-drying Rays. Give me one Petey Halpin over twenty-six cownoses.

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* Edwin Díaz, the Dodgers closer, has not pitched once this series. But here he is, in what is totally the exact situation the Dodgers pictured him in when they shelled out $69 million for him last winter—down a run in the top of the seventh.—Katie Woo, The Athletic.