The Dodgers went into Monday night believing they had the one arm that could steady everything.
With their season already wobbling after a Game 1 loss, they gave the ball to Yoshinobu Yamamoto - the pitcher who has been almost untouchable when the lights get bright. He entered with an 8-1 record and a 2.14 ERA in his postseason career, plus the weight of being the reigning World Series MVP.
He was also 3-0 with a 1.23 ERA in starts following Dodgers losses. On paper, it looked like exactly the kind of assignment that usually keeps Los Angeles on track.
Instead, the third inning ripped the game open.
Yamamoto was chased after just 2.2 innings as the Milwaukee Brewers rolled to a 7-4 win and a 2-0 lead in the National League Championship Series. He gave up three runs, walked two and struck out one, finishing with the shortest postseason start of his career at 75 pitches.
What made it sting for the Dodgers was the manner of it all. The Brewers didn’t just connect - they grinded.
They fouled off pitch after pitch, dragged out counts and then forced a 12-pitch walk from Jake Bauers that loaded the bases in the third. Christian Yelich followed with the go-ahead two-run single that ended Yamamoto’s night.
This was not a pitcher unfamiliar with October dominance against Milwaukee, either. Yamamoto had thrown a complete-game three-hitter against the Brewers in last year’s NLCS, the first playoff complete game since Justin Verlander in 2017. That’s part of what made Monday feel so jarring: the same pitcher, the same stage, and a completely different result.
Afterward, Mookie Betts summed it up bluntly: "It was tough. But he's a human being, too.
So I think everybody's so used to him being a robot that if he didn't go eight innings, no hits and whatever, then it wasn't Yamamoto. So it just shows he's a human being, and it's playoff baseball.
It's part of it."
The bigger concern for the Dodgers is that Milwaukee’s success didn’t look accidental. The Brewers had a clear approach: make Yamamoto work, spoil pitches, and refuse to give him easy outs. They executed it cleanly and exposed a plan that had been supposed to carry Los Angeles through October.
And it wasn’t just Monday. Tarik Skubal, the other piece of the Dodgers’ super-rotation, was knocked around in Game 1 and lasted 81 pitches. Together, the two pitchers managed only 7.2 innings across the first two games.
That’s the part that has changed the tone around this series. The Dodgers’ three-peat push was built on the idea that this rotation would overwhelm opponents in October. Instead, Milwaukee has spent 48 hours taking it apart.
Now Los Angeles heads back to Chavez Ravine down 2-0, a hole it hasn’t faced since the 2023 NLDS. The first possible NL three-peat is slipping, and it’s doing so in the one way almost nobody expected: the pitching has cracked first.
Yamamoto is now lined up for a potential Game 6, if the Dodgers can get that far. A week ago, that would have sounded absurd. After Milwaukee’s two-game surge, it feels a whole lot more real.
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