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.

NLCS Game Three: “Be really stubborn in there”

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Jackson Chourio

Chourio accepts his props for hitting Game Three’s first pitch into the bleachers Thursday night.

After his Dodgers lost National League Championship Series Game One by a measly 2-1 score, Mookie Betts said they needed to start playing Dodger baseball, “whatever Dodger baseball is.” Then, they lost Game Two a little more decisively, 7-4.

Now, you might not really want to know what they’re thinking. Not after the Brewers knocked them into the NLCS hole 0-3, with Wednesday night’s quite emphatic 6-2 Game Three win.

The Damndodgers are on the brink of winter vacation without a World Series berth to show for being 2026 baseball’s . . . second-winningest team. For being even-up with the Brewers prior to this NLCS, going 8-2 in their last regular season ten and going 15-5 in their last regular season twenty and going 20-10 in their last regular season thirty.

Oops. The Brewers went 22-8 in their last regular season thirty. They also went 4-3 against the Dodgers in their regular season series against each other. The Brewers team OPS was .743 to the Dodgers’s .762, a -19 point difference. Their team fielding-independent pitching (fourth in Show this year) showed the Dodgers (second in Show) only four points lower.

In other words, there wasn’t that much reason to assume the Damndodgers—those money-throwing monstrosities who can’t possibly have anything else such as scouting, player development, analytics, brains, and guts to make them NL West champions thirteen of the last fourteen seasons—were that far superior to these saintly scrappers out of the Milwaukee bargain houses.

Well, now. The Family Dollars are on the threshold of going to the Big Dance. All they have to do is take one more from the Cartiers. Difficult, but not impossible.

If the Dodgers find a way to batter the Brewers in Game Four Thursday night, the Brewers could always elect to make sacrificial lambs of relievers they haven’t yet deployed, comfortable knowing they have Jacob Misiorowski to ride in Game Five. Les Mis, plus their usual case of off-off-off-off-Broadway anti-stars. Even if it’s a Misiorowski-Tarik Skubal rematch.

Misiorowski to one side, how many people outside the burg that made beer ubiquitous could name one of the Brewers’s current cadre of characters not named Les Mis, Christian Yelich, Jackson Chourio, or William (Kid Brother of Willson) Contreras, before this postseason began?

Chourio merely renewed his name recognition Thursday night. All the left fielder had to do was exactly what he did in Dodger Stadium, hit Game Three’s first pitch the other way and over the right center field fence.* With one swing, he renewed his prospects of becoming the second Jackson behind a certain Hall of Famer to be thought of as any type of Mr. October.

“I was still putting my batting gloves on to get ready,” said Brewers first baseman Jake Bauers, who batted fifth in the lineup Thursday. “I just saw the ball flying, and I knew he got it. It kind of set the tone for the day and let everyone know that we’re here to win this game.”

There’d be two more bombs to come later in the game, from two of the Brewers’s heretofore-unknown soldier contingency. From Bauers, hitting a two-run homer in the seventh, then from center fielder Garrett Mitchell, following almost immediately with a solo blast landing not far from Bauers’s bomb.

So where did this power originate? Isn’t that anything but the Brewers’s usual game of scrape, fleck, hunt, and peck?

Jake Bauers

Bauers rounding third off his eleventh-pitch two-run homer.

“It’s funny,,” said outfielder Sal Frelick postgame. “We are hitting some homers, but that’s not the approach at the plate. It’s just: apply pressure, apply pressure. I think by applying pressure, we’re able to dictate that pace of play. It’s not result-oriented, it’s just at-bat oriented. It doesn’t matter if you get out, get on, strike out, whatever. Just take a chunk of the pitcher with you and establish playing that way.”

They’d take their chunks out of Dodgers starting pitcher Blake Snell in due course. First, they had to navigate the lefthander shutting them out for five innings to follow Chourio’s rude introduction. Other than a one-out walk (Mitchell) and base hit to left (rookie shortstop Cooper Pratt) in the second, Snell looked as though he’d filed ownership papers on the guys too many still underrate.

Brewers starter Robert Gasser (now, there’s a name for a pitcher, even if his fastball isn’t the type to be called a gasser) was almost as good as Snell before turning it over to the bullpen. He pitched five solid and survived the Dodgers putting their leadoff men aboard three times and coming up scoreless.

At first, it looked as though manager Pat Murphy played the wrong hand. Abner Uribe, heretofore one of the Brewers’s more effective relievers, had his first truly shaky postseason outing in the sixth: walk (left fielder Teoscar Hernández), walk (right fielder Kyle Tucker), swinging strikeout (pinch hitter Max Muncy), walk (still-ailing designated hitter Shohei Ohtani), two-run double (catcher Will Smith). Forcing Murphy to reach for DL Hall to keep the deficit to 1-2.

Come the top of the seventh, though, the Brewers made Dodgers manager Dave Roberts pay for forgetting Snell’s career-long vulnerability: going the third time around the enemy lineup. Already leaving himself vulnerable by switching parts of his better defense out of the game, Roberts’s forgetfulness may yet prove a key reason why the Dodgers don’t three-peat, if they don’t.

Snell walked DH Andrew Vaughn after a seven pitch battle to open. With Christian Yelich pinch running, the lefthander fought the portside-swinging Bauers epically, through ten pitches. On the full-count eleventh pitch, Yelich took off as though a police cruiser bore  down upon him . . . and Bauers hit the pitch into the right field bleachers.

That overthrew the not-quite-secure Dodger lead by a run. Mitchell checked in, took ball one, then drove one not far from where Bauers’s blast landed. Ending Snell’s evening two batters too late, leaving Evan Phillips to come in and get three outs to contain the damage.

Unfortunately for the Dodgers, that containment lasted only long enough for Roki Sasaki to surrender back-to-back one-out eighth-inning singles to second baseman Brice Turang and catcher Contreras. Roberts brought Justin Wrobleski in for Yelich. Wrobleski put Yelich in the hole 0-2 before throwing a ball off the plate and Smith’s mitt, enabling Turang to score.

It almost felt as though the Brewers rubbed it in a little in the ninth. Pratt singled with one out, stole second with two out and third baseman Joey Ortiz at the plate, then came home with the sixth and final run when Ortiz punched a bast hit. Walk the line? They’ll walk, single, punch, slash, grind, and bomb the line. Whatever it takes.

“Murph says it, Murph preaches it, Murph expects it. Ball-strike them, get good pitches to hit,” said Vaughn post-game. “If [the pitcher’s] not going to give you anything, walk to first base. Be really stubborn in there, and that’s going to help us win ballgames.”

“Not swinging at crap” is the way Pratt put it. Roberts isn’t that blunt, but he all but agreed with the freshman shortstop.

“They’re taking better at-bats than they did last year,” said Roberts, recalling the Dodgers’s sweeping the Brewers in last year’s NLCS. “Their ball-in-play averages, gosh dang, it’s got to be .400. When they put the ball in play, it’s a hit. They’re also slugging, which they didn’t do last year. Those are good combos.”

Good, stubborn combos. The kind that win postseason games. Postseason series, even.

* As analyst Jessica Brand pointed out, it’s the first game-opening, first-pitch, first-batter bomb in Brewers history. Chourio hit a first-pitch, first-inning homer in NLCS Game Two last year, but it was the bottom of the first.

 

NLCS Game One: A Damndodger hole

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Brice Turang, Tarik Skubal

Brice Turang about to send Tarik Skubal’s unsinking sinker into the bullpen Sunday night . . .

When the National League Championship Series opened Sunday night, guess what didn’t happen? The big spending blue whale didn’t devour the anchovies hosting them in the somewhat foggy Milwaukee pond. American Family Field hoisted baseball’s best (the home team) and second-best (the visitors) records this season.

The visiting Damndodgers and the hosting Brewers even got to throw their best pitchers at each other. How often do you get a defending Cy Young Award winner against the guy likely to win one this time around? Forget that a moment. This was going to be shades of Sandy Koufax v. Whitey Ford. Wasn’t it?

Not quite. Not this time. Neither Jacob Misiorowski nor Tarik Skubal dominated the way their previous notices showed them capable of doing. They were good enough. Not great enough. Certainly not overpowering or dominant enough.

Oh sure, Les Mis hit 101+ mph on the gun more than a few times—44 such pitches, in fact—just the way he’s supposed to do. And the Damndodgers went in hell bent on refusing to let those bullets beat them. Those bullets got only an 18.5 percent miss rate; 21.7 percent less than on the regular season.

Skubal went two-thirds of an inning further than Misiorowski and struck out two more. But he was pried for a pair of runs to his counterpart’s one. The bullpens went to work from there. And the 2-1 lead the NL Central-champion Brewers wrestled out of the NL West-champion Damndodgers stuck for the Game One win.

Until game time, of course, you could hear everyone across the great divides moaning that the Damndodgers were going to do it again. They were going to prove yet again that money talks. Talks, divides, and conquers. Weren’t they?

This was, of course, the beginning of a rematch between last year’s NLCS combatants. That was then: The Damndodgers led every inning but one. (And, got thatclose to losing the World Series in seven.) This was Sunday night: The Damndodgers led in only two innings.

So quit assuming they’re going to throw the Brewers out of the running like the sheriff running the town drunk off. These Brewers are going to make the Damndodgers work for it. They might even make the Damndodgers go home for the winter early enough to cause questions, doubts, and recriminations enough. Might.

When Shohei Ohtani and his still-balky inflamed left knee checked in at the plate leading off the second with no score yet, couldn’t you just hear the groaning that the only thing the Damndodgers did moving him to the cleanup spot was delay the inevitable?

Well, the only man in the house splitting the heavens or threatening the opposite hemisphere Sunday night was Brewers second baseman Brice Turang. He opened the bottom of the fourth ahead of Skubal, 2-0, when he caught hold of a sinker meant to go inside, which didn’t get that far in, and which didn’t have all that much sink. Turang sunk it behind the left center field fence, right into the Brewers’s bullpen, tying the game at one each.

Two innings earlier, Ohtani took care of what proved the lone Damndodger run of the night when he let Misiorowski walk him on four pitches none of which arrived where he likes to hit. Then, he came around to score on one line drive hit to right (Teoscar Hernández) and another base hit through the hole at second (Andy Pages).

Go ahead and say it. Say that you think the Damndodgers were damn lucky to catch Les Mis on an off night. How off? Jayson Stark (The Athletic) dug it up: During the regular season, the opposition hit a mere .174 off the Misiorowski heater. On Sunday night, they hit .500 off it.

Go ahead and say it. Say that you think the Brewers might have been lucky that the Damndodgers couldn’t do a thing with anything else Misiorowski threw. Remember: He’s got breaking balls that dance the way people once did on Soul Train. He kept the Damndodgers to 1-for-8 when throwing his curve ball, cutter, and slider, two of which got turned into inning-ending double plays.

Skubal lasted only a little bit longer, until he walked Garrett Mitchell to open the Milwaukee fifth, surrendered a Cooper Pratt bunt to the right side pushing Mitchell to second base, then surrendered a first-pitch, tie-breaking single through the hole at shortstop from Luis Lara, a rookie whose calling card until Game One was sterling defense—enough to be worth eleven defensive runs saved above the National League average.

So Misiorowski vs. Skubal didn’t quite live up to its advance publicity? News flash: the heavily hyped duels sometimes don’t. They played baseball other than the joust that wasn’t Sunday night.

“He’s going to be fine,” said Brewers manager Pat Murphy of Skubal. “I’m sure he’s going to be able to feed his family and be a great dad. He can lose tonight, and he’ll be fine.”

Both sides threw strong-enough bullpens at each other once the big arms were done for the evening. Almost.

The Brewers handed themselves a grand opportunity for insurance damage in the bottom of the eighth. Jackson Chourio—their knight of the earlier postseason rounds—opened with a base hit and chased Damndodger reliever Even Phillips, who’d struck the side out in the seventh. Against Tanner Scott, the Brewers bunted Chourio to second (Turang), accepted a walk on the house (Willson Contreras), then a strikeout-following second wak on the house (Andrew Vaughn) to load the pads.

Who bunts that soon after hitting a big bomb? “Not shocking at all,” said Turang of seeing a bunt sign from his third base coach. “To me, it was almost like if he would have told me to hit, I would have been like, I’m gonna bunt—because I just know the situation in the game is calling me to bunt there.”

That’s one kind of dangerous-enough risk. Unless you’re bunting for base hits, something the Brewers did extremely well this season, surrendering an out to move a runner who has (yes, you can look it up) less enough than a fifty percent chance of scoring after the bunt than he had before it, is not normally smart baseball.

But Scott’s kind of risk-taking usually invites a team to teach the risking opponent a little lesson in foolishness, no matter what time of game it might be. The only lesson Mitchell taught this time was how to waste a gift that should have kept on giving, when he grounded out to Betts at short for the side and the strand.

Then it was Trevor Megill’s turn to come out of the Brewers pen and . . . channel his inner Craig Kimbrel. Not the good side, either.

In a scene Cardiac Craig might know only too well, Megill got two quick outs. Then, the fun began. He walked Tucker on a full count and pinch hitter Josue De Paola on 3-1 with Betts looming on deck.

The regular season wasn’t a typical Betts season. It’s been a couple of years since he had one of those, and it’s entirely possible that age (he’s 33) might be creeping up on him at long enough last. But he’s still Mookie Betts, he still posted a .950 OPS on the year with men on first and second at all, and he still posted a 1.039 OPS with men on first and second and two out.

He picked the wrong time to face Megill when the latter decided he’d had enough of being the new Craig Kimbrel. Megill got Betts to fly out to the track in right to end it. And, like Kimbrel on one too many occasions since 2018, Megill still got a save credit for squirming out of a jam entirely of his own making.

“You try to get them to play from behind, to get them out of their game,” said Damndodgers manager Dave Roberts. “You’ve got to be sound fundamentally to not give them extra outs. Yeah, they’re very consistent in how they play the game, and that’s a credit to all those guys.”

“We should play Dodger baseball,” Betts said. “Whatever Dodger baseball is, that’s what we should do. We should not try to play Milwaukee Brewers baseball.” Whatever Dodger baseball is?

Interesting post mortem, that. As pesky, spunky, and insistent as they are, the Brewers couldn’t have gotten that far into Dodger heads already. Could they?