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?

Cleveland rocked, and so should the LCSes

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Gavin Williams

Gavin Williams (with 12) tied Charles Nagy’s Cleveland franchise single-game postseason strikeout record.

Unfortunately, there are some things even a pope can’t bring about. Whatever the Holy See’s divine pull, even he couldn’t deliver the White Sox from the hands of their adversaries. The hands or, in the case of the Guardians, the arms.

By the way, that’s the American League Central-winning Guardians. That means that this year’s American and National League Championship Series will be played strictly by teams who finished the regular season in first place.

So take that, Commissioner Pepperwinkle and your claque, you suggesting the shorter regular season, further diluted (sorry, expanded) postseason with best-of-seven division series, and letting the higher-seeded teams choose their victims (sorry, opponents) in the wild card and division series rounds.

Take that, baseball government spokesman Glen Caplin, and while you’re at it, take your formal statement and shove it:

A shorter regular season unlocks making October even better for our fans—with fewer weekday afternoon games, a longer Division Series, and more opportunities to see the game’s best pitchers on the biggest stage. And allowing the top seeds to select their opponents in the first two rounds would create compelling storylines, intensify existing rivalries, and create new ones.

The pre-LCS is long enough as it is now. We’ve just been through 25 games and, if each set had gone the distance, we could have been through 32. That’s before adding a minimum of eight and maximum of fourteen to come, which would have us at 46 games all postseason long. And what did it all mean this time around?

So far, it’s meant that the cream rose, for the most part. Three out of the four League Championship Series combatants finished one through three overall on the season: the NL Central-winning Brewers (103-59), the NL West-winning Damndodgers (100-62, and yes people do make it sound one word when they say it), and the AL East-winning Rays (98-64).

The Guardians won the AL Central as baseball’s eleventh-best team. Five out of the six teams standing between them and the now-gone NL East champion Braves (94-68) made it into the postseason but got dispatched early enough and, in one or two cases, in utter embarrassment enough.

What was the fun of the Yankees shoving the Red Sox to one side and out of the action in two straight in their wild card series just to turn up even more futile getting swept away by the Rays? What was the fun of the Padres shoving the Cubs to one side and out of the action in two straight only to get bumped off by the Brewers in four?

Chicago had enough heartache when the Cubs got pushed away. Now they have to handle the White Sox, who had an even more charming tale of resurrection following three straight 100+ loss seasons, getting overthrown after it looked early enough and often enough as though they just might overmatch the Guardians.

Savour it, Guards fans. Your heroes are going to their second ALCS in three seasons. Two years ago, the Yankees shoved them away in five. They won’t have things simple against the Rays this time around. But they’re liable to make it fun regardless.

Not that it was simple getting here. The Guards got wrestled down 2-0 to start this division series, and in their own house. Then the set moved to Rate Field, the house where the White Sox delivered a storybook resurrection this season, then flattened what was left of injured and aging Houston in the wild card round.

You thought the White Sox got a bit rude in the Guards’s house? The Guards shifted from scoring a mere three across division series Games One and Two to scoring four in the top of the Game Three third alone. They shifted from resembling the team over which the White Sox might step into overthrowing them twice in Rate Field and once in their own joint.

This time, it wasn’t a higher-scoring huff. This time, the only scoring the Guards needed was José Ramírez, in the bottom of the fourth and with Steven Kwan aboard on a leadoff single, hitting one over the right field fence. Their pitching—which struck a record 21 White Sox out—took care of the rest. (What a way to bookend their season: as my friend Jessica Brand pointed out, the White Sox opened 2026 by getting punched out 20 times in a game by the Brewers’s pitching staff.)

Sean Burke, José Ramírez

José Ramírez about to hit Sean Burke for the two-run homer that was all the Guards needed on a record-making night for their pitching staff.

Everybody wondered if Guardians starter Gavin Williams would be running on empty, or at least down to his final drops, after his Game Four-ending shutout relief inning. We should all have such depleted tanks. He took a no-hitter into the sixth, including twelve strikeouts (tying Charles Nagy for a Cleveland franchise postseason game record) and striking out the side twice, before he threw a breaking ball errant enough to hit White Sox shortstop Colson Montgomery on the foot to open.

Chicago would love to have many innings back over the city’s postseason history. The sixth Saturday night would have to rank among the top five at least. From the Montgomery plunk, the White Sox went to a two-out base hit from Kyle Teel before Williams’s evening finally ended with a bases-loading walk to Miguel Vargas—with lefthand-hitting first baseman Munetaka Murekami due up and Guards manager Stephen Vogt bringing lefthander Erik Sabrowski in to pitch.

Maybe Murakami would overcome his weakness against portside pitching this time, when the White Sox’s season depended the most upon it? Not quite. Sabrowski struck him out swinging. The best threat of the White Sox’s night evaporated just like that. The Pope watching from his Vatican roost must have been reminded that even he has only so much divine influence.

The Guards needed nothing more than further bullpen bulls Hunter Gaddis and (coming in with one out and a man on first in the eighth) Cade Smith to keep the White Sox pinned. Smith even paid tribute to Williams’s effort by striking the side out in the bottom of the ninth to finish it.

In one way, the outcome didn’t matter: Except for the Damndodgers, the LCSes will be fought by the lower budget corps. The Damndodgers lost their season series to the Brewers, 3-4. The Guardians, with the number 29 player payroll of 2026, fought the number 26 White Sox to get to the ALCS. Where they’ll meet the number 27 payroll Rays.

Never mind that saying the Damndodgers do it with dollars alone is a willfully ignorant lie.

There’s no earthly reason to believe the Brewers will be NLCS pushovers. Not with Jacob Misiorowski starting Game One. And no, Les Mis does not live by fastball alone, even if his is faster and better controlled than Nolan Ryan’s. He’s got a cutter, a slider, and a curve ball, any and all of which can dance like Fred and Ginger and beat, sweep, and clean you like a Hoover.

There’s no earthly reason to believe the Dodgers are invincible despite winning the two previous World Series. (Remember how the Blue Jays got thatclose to winning last year but for old man Miguel Rojas? Commissioner Pepperwinkle hopes you forgot.) Not even with Tarik Skubal starting Game One. Maybe Sku and Les Mis fight to a draw and turn things over to the bulls. Maybe the Brewers start praying their bulls aren’t full of bull. Maybe.

There’s also no earthly reason to believe the ALCS will be a crashing bore. If the Guards keep pitching the way they manhandled the White Sox, assuming their arms and/or shoulders don’t resign their commissions, they stand a chance against a Rays team that figured out how to build a dominant, all-elements team from the Family Dollar clearance shelves.

So the Empire Emeritus and the Olde Towne Team aren’t there? Except for entitlement-drunk Yankee fans who still think the World Series is illegitimate without them (and who still think, erroneously, that only the ghost of George Steinbrenner can “restore” them), who cares? Except for entitlement-longing Red Sox fans who think they’ve earned the right to a fifth Series title this century (they already lead the century with four), who cares?

The Lords of Baseball will cast their longing eyes upon the proceedings, misread the forest, misinterpret the trees, and ignore those among their ranks who lack the up-and-down development, discipline, and intelligence of those now playing for pennants.

Must I remind you that big payrolls (read: $200 million or higher) did the Mets and the Blue Jays no seasonal favours? That they didn’t keep the Yankees, the Phillies, the Red Sox, the Padres, the Cubs, the Braves, and the Astros from early postseason exits?

The Lords, and the fans and writers who think only money determines who takes the next lease to the Promised Land, insist that what you’re seeing coming out of Tampa Bay, Milwaukee, and Cleveland is three flukes, two of whom stand to be used as toothpicks by the big blue whale out of Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, if the Dodgers do get thwarted, the wailing will start swiftly enough over how difficult-to-impossible it is to win more than two straight World Series anymore.

Too many people can never be satisfied. Those who can be will now enjoy a pair of likely to be splendid LCSes and a just-as-likely to be splendid World Series.

The Papal bullpen, and other division series observations

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Muneteka Murakami

Munetaka Murakami about to demolish Parker Messick’s pitch for an ALDS Game One home run Saturday. (MLB TV capture.)

Just think. A few more days, and there just might be a pair of League Championship Series lined up with nobody involved except four division winners. Among the division series contenders who didn’t win their divisions, let’s be honest. The most likeable of the group is the White Sox.

Come to think of it, the White Sox did edge the American League Central champion Guardians by one game in their regular season series. Considering where they’d come from only too recently, beating the Guards 3-0 in their division series Game One must have been a confidence builder for which you couldn’t forge a special order.

Back to them in a few.

The National League Central-winning Brewers are a lot closer to that all-champ NLCS after slipping past the wild card Padres from the NL West in division series Game Two Sunday. From a whacky-finish 3-2 Game One win, the Brewers overcame an early fielding mishap and a two-run deficit to win it, 4-3, on a walkoff single.

Game One’s whacky finish involved a ninth-inning American Family Field ricochet roof catch that prevented San Diego’s Ty (Viva la) France from hitting a two-run homer that would have yanked the Padres up and ahead off a one-run deficit. The ball bumped a roof rail and sank into Brewers left fielder Jackson Chourio’s glove.

The ground rules in the park say balls hitting the roof or its cabling in fair territory are in play and catchable for outs as long as the ball stays fair. That’s what an appeal told the Padres, who tried arguing to no avail that the ball was foul.

Maybe the last thing the Friars needed was Chourio in the middle of their Game Two loss. Especially with their best relief pitcher, Mason Miller, out to work the bottom of the ninth on assignment to make their 3-2 lead hold up. Miller didn’t exactly make things simple for himself, either. After a leadoff groundout, he walked Christian Yelich (who stole second as soon as he knew it to be available, practially) and Sal Frelick. He got pinch hitter Andrew Vaughn to fly out to right, but then he walked pinch hitter Gary Sanchez and the pillows loaded.

Enter Chourio, who’d helped make the Padres’s lives miserable enough in Game One. Before he caught the Ricochet Heard ‘Round the World (social media argued about the play almost an entire day to follow), he’d tied Game One in the third with a hefty two-run homer, his fifth bomb of this postseason thus far.

He wrestled Miller to 2-2. Then, he shot a low liner beneath diving Padres second baseman Jake Cronenworth, sending Yelich and Frelick on a frolic home with the tying and winning runs, Frelick coming in a dive Olympic swimmers might have envied.

You might start getting the idea that the Padres may believe their survival chances now depend on having Chourio kidnapped and hidden away on some remote island in sub-Antarctica. Clearly, the guy has no respect for the team that won twenty out of its final 23 regular-season games. To him, and to his fellow Crew members, the Padres are the guys one loss from wait till next year.

Now, back to the White Sox. Well, let’s look big picture first. Didn’t the Braves look unintimidated for having lost their NL division series Game One by two to the Damn Dodgers, with Tarik Skubal manhandling them and Teoscár Hernández, Kyle Tucker, and Max Muncy taking them over the Dodger Stadium fences? Of course not.

Don’t the Rays feel a little more than confident leading their AL division series 1-0, after Drew Rasmussen got close enough to no-hitting the Yankees—before Austin Wells got a little greedy after busting the no-no in the eighth, and thrown out trying to make his double a triple? And, after Jonathan Aranda provided the game’s only run when he went against the usual Rays way (ninth from the bottom of the Show for long balls) and hit one into the right field seats in the third?

Of course they do. And don’t think Pope Leo XIV’s favourite team doesn’t feel all varieties of confident entering their AL division series against the Guards.

They dispatched the Astros in the wild card series so swiftly it was legitimate to question whether that set was just a magic trick. Then, they bullpenned the Guards quiet in ALDS Game One. (The papal bullpen?)

Meanwhile, Munetaka Murakami’s hefty two-run homer in the fourth, Colson Montgomery’s RBI double in the seventh, and the White Sox bulls striking out twelve among them, while leaving the Guards stranding the bases loaded twice, took care of the rest.

But I sense a lot of people not tied to Chicago pulling for at least one non-division champ to make it to the LCS. That would be the gang who broke the Original Mets’s single-season loss record two years ago, picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, tinkered here, tucked there, then shoved the Astros to one side.

God bless the White Sox. The Pope already did.

In fact, that blessing plus the swift wild card series dispatch inspired a sentence that ought to win this year’s Pulitzer Prize—if there is a Pulitzer for single lines. “An offense predicated on power and prayer got none of the former and played a team with the Pope on its side,” wrote The Athletic‘s Chandler Rome. (It had to be a writer named Rome?)

Suddenly it’s to wonder and possibly fear the Padres picking up, dusting off, pushing the Brewers to a fifth game overthrow, and finding ways to win the NLCS from there. Think of the mad fun Rome (the writer, not the Vatican) and others may have if the White Sox finish the Guards off, then prevail in an ALCS.

A World Series featuring Friars on one side and a team with the Pope as a lifelong fan on the other side. And you thought a hypothetical Cubs vs. Red Sox World Series might test the Lord’s patience.