Tag Archives: William Contreras

WS: At long last, Bushville wins again

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Milwaukee Brewers

Series MVP William Contreras (with mask), Les Mis, and the Brewers give Milwaukee its first World Series title since Sputnik I. (Fox Sports capture.)

Long enough ago, in a world far enough away, Milwaukee hosted its first World Series champion. It happened in the same month as Sputnik I greeted the world and Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The city the Yankees dismissed as Bushville embraced the insult as a badge of glory.

Those Braves turned the Yankees aside in seven games, led by a Yankee discard named Lew Burdette, who went forth to make the world’s worst country music record until the advent of the Legendary Stardust Cowboy. And, by three Hall of Famers (Henry Aaron, Eddie Mathews, Warren Spahn) equal to those Yankees’s three. (Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, Mickey Mantle.)

Bushville won. It only took another 69 years for the city putting on the Schlitz to host another World Series champion. The Brewers of Bushville kept the Rays of Tampa at bay yet again Wednesday night. Their 4-1 Game Five triumph had everything except the kitchen sink thrown into it.

The Series in which only four balls were hit over fences didn’t need the long ball for both sides to engage, electrify, and entertain. Until the Rays plain ran out of petrol after their Game Four semi-surprise win, both teams had enough small, medium, and rub-a-dub-dub mojo working to leave fans wanting as much more as they could offer.

This wasn’t just a World Series conquest.

The Brewers swept their nemeses from L.A. out of this year’s National League Championship Series. The same Damndodgers who dispatched them from three of their seven previous postseasons. The Brewers also became only the fifth team to win 100+ regular season games and get rid of the previous season’s World Series winners.

They won eight straight postseason games from the final game of their division series win to Game Three Tuesday night. Tying the postseason streak records of the 2019 Nationals, the 2014 Royals, the 2005 White Sox, and the 2004 Red Sox. It might have been nine straight for these Brewers if only manager Pat Murphy removed his caution vest for the bottom of the Game Four twelfth.

After his sharp rookie shortstop Cooper Pratt hit the tiebreaking home run in the top of the Game Four twelfth, Murphy could and arguably should have sent his scheduled Game Five starter Jacob Misiorowski out for the bottom of the Game Four twelfth. The World Series is three outs from being in your vault, Skip!

To everyone snarking that Misiorowski’s Game Five triumph proved Murphy right in holding him back—and sending unknown soldier Shane Drohan out to surrender the tying and losing runs on four straight singles—consider that it also proved Les Mis might well have nailed the Series-winning outs without anything interrupting him.

Inexperience! some might have snarked at suggesting Misiorowski should have been saved. Aside from him already having established himself in this postseason, starting pitchers have been sent out for attempted shutdown relief with past World Series wins on the line or close enough to it. At all levels of experience.

And, rookies or sophomores haven’t been unheard of pitching in Series games where survival is on the menu or winning is just within reach. Come to think of it, another Brewers rook, Robert Gasser, got lost in the aftermath after that unprecedented two-out, eight-hit, eight-run Game Three fifth memory-lapsed his magnificent starting six shutout innings.

So it was Drohan, after Rays third baseman Joey Ortiz’s very unfortunate throwing error allowed Junior Caminero aboard (though he’d come out for a runner after dinging his leg) prodded Murphy to life Antonio Senzatela. Drohan, a rookie. Inexperience!

You are ok with sending a rookie out who’d shown up once, in the NLCS, where he  surrendered an earned run, two walks, and a hit in one inning’s work, to nail down a World Series sweep? But you’re not ok with sending out a sophomore who’s the likely National League Cy Young Award winner and gave you a 1.86 fielding-independent pitching rate in the first two postseason rounds?

That scratching sound you heard was Casey Stengel on his head from the Elysian Fields, trying to remind you of his law: If you have an opening, shove with your shoulder.

Then it was single, RBI single, single, and Ben Williamson becoming a Tampa Bay hero singling the game winner home Tuesday night. For the first time since the Series moved to Tampa in the first place, the racket inside the Trop belonged to the Rays fans who made up about half the audience.

Their joy lasted long enough for Misiorowski to take the Game Five ball, pitch five and two-thirds shutout innings, and get about ten times as many ground and (especially) fly outs as he got strikeouts (two). Now the racket belonged to the traveling Brewers faithful.

Now, it was stout Rays starting pitcher Drew Rasmussen going gamely forth on short rest and working four one-run, four-punchout innings, before yielding to a Rays bullpen whose needle was just about pointing to E.

Now, it was Series MVP Willson Contreras doing his usual steering of the ship from behind the plate, deploying the ABS system almost as though it had his name on it, and pitching in at the plate by thanking Christian Yelich for taking one on the leg for the team opening the top of the sixth with an RBI double right away.

Now, it was three more Brewers runs to come through that pen, from an RBI single in the fifth to the aforesaid Contreras double plus a long foul sacrifice fly in the sixth.

When Chandler Simpson, the Rays left fielder who turns basepaths and outfield routes into track meets, singled catcher Liam Hicks home in the bottom of the ninth, it seemed almost like the Rays were tempted to say excuse us before expiring.

They don’t need excuses. Both sides made a few mistakes along the way. Both sides took the other’s measure and found nothing wanting. Two teams who looked like an even match in abilities and approaches entered this World Series. The Brewers found ways to resemble the Third Army without a crowd big tanks or incendiary devices.

Even their fans found ways to persevere, especially when World Series ticket prices for the Milwaukee leg of the Series compared proportionally to the ancient, discredited $200 hammer. Brewers fans traveled to Tampa in such force that Tropicana Field could have been mistaken for the Brewers’s alternate or spring training digs. And American Family Field packed full regardless for showing Games Three through Five on the LEDs.

Nothing remained but for baseball itself to get the message that its government’s narrative about the Davids helpless against the Goliaths has always been a lie. The Brewers, no Goliaths they, have won five of the past six National League Central titles and six of the past nine. The Rays, except for shaky 2024 and 2025, have three American League East titles and a second place finish in the past seven years.

But The Narrative would have you think the Damndodgers coming thatclose to losing last year’s World Series before getting swept out of this year’s NL pennant was an aberration. It would have you think the Rays knocking the Empire Emeritus out this year in a division series sweep was a hiccup.

It would have you think anything except that the whining from Commissioner Pepperwinkle and his will-nots (remember: this isn’t haves versus have-nots, this is wills versus will-nots, and the wills aren’t limited to kabillionaires on the coasts) is a sales pitch for Uncle Rob’s Happy Henbane.

It would have you think that nothing means anything except the big player salaries that must be capped. It would have you think that there’s nothing wrong with under-investing in the kind of managing, coaching, training and medicine, scouting and player development, analytical minds and attitudinal minds.

The kind that enable a Pat Murphy to dismiss the Damndodgers as a lot of Hall of Famers who proved lesser than a lot of gamers. (The Damndodgers sure didn’t help their own cause by letting Shohei Ohtani play while still hurting, did they?)

Murphy knows better than that. He knows bloody well that it isn’t just dollars or Cooperstown candidates that make them the Damndodgers. He wouldn’t have hoisted the World Series trophy or sent his game sweatshirt to an eager Hall of Fame if he didn’t. But he’s entitled to be a smartass for a little while.

A will won the World Series. A will lost it after beating another will for a pennant. With Commissioner Pepperwinkle’s only-too-eager help, the will-nots will continue flogging the wrong horse. They’ll never get that this postseason and this World Series knocked Uncle Rob’s Happy Henbane harrumph into a cocked blue and gold hat.

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.

Who has the next-to-last-laugh now?

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Kyle Tucker

Kyle Tucker’s seventh-inning strikeout seemed to take what remained of the Cubs’ wind away Saturday night. (TBS television capture.)

“It’s really the only inning you could talk about,” lamented Cubs manager Craig Counsell about the top of the sixth, after National League division series Game Five. “We just didn’t do much.

“We had six base runners. You’re going to have to hit homers to have any runs scoring in scenarios like that,” Counsell continued. “They pitched very well. I mean, they pitched super well and we didn’t.”

“They” were the Brewers, whom Counsell used to manage, until he reached managerial free agency and the Cubs decided to dump David Ross for no reason better than that Counsell became available. Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer admitted as much earlier this month.

Two second-place National League Central finishes and one division series loss later, Cub fans could be forgiven if they think it’s been karma for the manner in which Ross was vaporised. The Brewers won Game Five, 3-1, with 90 percent pitching depth, five percent unusual slugging, and maybe five percent karma-the-bitch.

Until, that is, they review the seventh inning in American Family Field Saturday night. First and second, nobody out, and Kyle Tucker—the man for whom the Cubs traded three to the Astros last December, in perhaps the signature moment that explains why they made that trade—coming to the plate.

He faced Aaron Ashby, the nephew of former major league pitcher Andy Ashby, and possibly the best relief pitcher on the Brewers staff. (Regular season: 2.16 ERA; 2.70 fielding-independent pitching rate.) His Cubs were down only 2-1. He got ahead of Ashby three balls, no strikes. Michael Busch (leadoff single) and Nico Hoerner (hit by a pitch) leaned away from second and first itching for a reason to take off.

The odds were in favour of them getting that reason momentarily. Tucker had spent the first three games of the division series as a singles hitter, but in Game Four he finally unloaded, blasting a leadoff home run in the bottom of the seventh. Maybe, despite an early strikeout and a subsequent ground out Saturday night, Tucker’s power strokes were back from the fixit shop.

Big maybe. Ashby pumped a pair of bullets Nolan Ryan himself might have applauded. Tucker swung through both of them.

Then Brewers manager Pat Murphy brought rookie righthander Chad Patrick into the game. Patrick, a righthander with seven minor league seasons behind him and not one Show appearance until the Brewers called him up from AAA Nashville for this year. He got Seiya Suzuki—who’d tied the game at one in the top of the second, when he answered William Contreras’s first-inning solo home run with a bomb of his own against Jacob Misiorowski—to drive one to left that found Jackson Chourio’s glove. He dropped strike three called in on Ian Happ.

Not one Cub came home in that inning or the rest of the way. The Brewers added one more in the seventh, when Brice Turang took Cub reliever Andrew Kitteredge over the right center field fence.

“I was looking up at the heavens to Bob Uecker,” said Brewers general manager Matt Arnold, referencing the beloved late Hall of Fame broadcaster and wit, who’d become as much a face of the Brewers as any player in their history until his passing last January. “Like, during the game, I’m like, ‘Bob, we need you’.”

“I must be in the front row,” Uecker must have said from his roost in the Elysian Fields.

He must have. This team had baseball’s best regular season record this year but entered the division series with a string of failure to get past their first postseason stages for five out of the previous six seasons. They were still recovering from their former closer Devin Williams, now a reliever and frequent hate object (by their own fans) for the Yankees, serving a pitch Mets first baseman Pete Alonso demolished like a munitions expert in the deciding wild card series game last year.

This time, they had to recover from the Cubs, their next-door-state rivals, coming back from a 2-0 game deficit.

This time, they made it. So far.

They have a National League Championship Series date with the Dodgers. They secured the date doing what enough people thought they couldn’t do if it meant paying the ransoms for their kidnapped families: slug. Contreras and Turang were joined by Andrew Vaughn in the fourth, blasting a full-count service from Collin Rea into the left field seats.

They even did it with men who weren’t even topics on last year’s team. Vaughn and Patrick were joined in that club by Misiorowski, who relieved Game Five’s opening closer Trevor Megill, surrendered only Suzuki’s second-inning smash, but otherwise worked spotlessly for his four innings. In what turned out a bullpen battle, the Brewers pen was just that much more efficient than the Cubs pen, which also deployed one starter (Rea) among a group of bulls.

Andrew Vaughn

Vaughn running out his fourth-inning bomb. (TBS television capture.)

And, boy, is the deal that brought Vaughn from the pathetic White Sox to the Brewers looking better every hour. It happened when the Brewers elected to move Aaron Civale from the starting rotation to the bullpen, and Civale responded with a spoken desire to play somewhere else if that was the case. Be careful what you wish for, was the answer . . . and Civale went from a contender to a basement dweller just like that, in early June, with Vaughn—once a first-round draft pick, demoted to the farm a month earlier—coming aboard.

Therein lies a distinction between these Brewers and the Cubs they just turned aside. The Brewers don’t have Cub money, but they don’t let that stop them from constant upgrade searching when necessary. The Cubs have Cub money.  But they’d rather undergo root canal without anesthetic than spend it. And they lack the Brewers’s bargain basement ingenuity. They haven’t yet figured out that you don’t have to shop at the Magnificent Mile all the time. You can find amazing upgrades at Lots 4 Less.

How will these Brewers be perceived going into an NLCS against those Dodgers? Contradictorily, of course. The Brewers swept the Dodgers in their regular-season series, 6-0. But there’ll be more than enough who think the Dodgers will still be the overdogs. Even if the Dodgers’ NLCS ticket was stamped by a horror of a throwing error by Phillies relief pitcher Orion Kerkering in Game Four of their division series.

But how will these Cubs be perceived going into winter vacation? Not too favourably, after all, one fears. The top of their lineup acquitted themselves well enough, particularly Busch with three of his four division series hits clearing the fences and Nico Hoerner with his hits in each game and his team-leading .476 postseason on-base percentage. But the bottom of the lineup disappeared. The collective slash line of the Cubs’ bottom five? .120/.215/.205.

And they’re likely enough to move forward without Tucker, who becomes a free agent and who’s perceived widely enough as thinking about moving on. Even if this usually un-expressive fellow who prefers to let his game do his talking calls it “an honour” to play with this group of Cubs.

That group of Cubs needs a small, not major bullpen remake, and they need to romance and re-sign Tucker, whom they could and should have extended during the second half of the season. But maybe the Cubs need a front-office overhaul, too. The kind that brings in persuaders who can convince the Ricketts family that it’s time to open the purse strings but think about trying Lots 4 Less after that one Magnificent Mile splurge.

Finishing with their best regular-season record since 2018 shouldn’t be enough. Three straight second-place NL Central finishes shouldn’t be enough. But maybe watching the Brewers go forth and tangle honourably with the ogres of the National League West will give these Cubs—and their ownership that’s as endowed as Mercedes-Benz but prefers to drive indiscriminately off the Chicago Auto Warehouse lot—more than a little pause.

The Brewers couldn’t care less for now. They’re enjoying their first postseason series clincher since 2018, the year they shoved the Rockies aside in a division series sweep. And if they wanted any further incentive, they got it from cynics and Cub fans alike who snarked that they hadn’t won a postseason series yet as they took the Cubs on. As if their round-one bye meant squat.

So who has the next-to-last laugh now?

Once upon a time, the early rock and roll era included a novelty hit, “Beep Beep,” in which a little Nash Rambler (I always presumed it to be the anti-classic, two-seat Metropolitan) went tire-to-tire with a Cadillac in a daring little race. The Brewers are the Nash Rambler about to go tire-to-tire with the Dodgers’ Cadillacs.

And, unlike “Beep Beep’s” challenger, they know how to get themselves out of second gear.