The Brewers keep finding the same route to victory this October: absorb the first punch, then answer right back.
That pattern showed up again against the Dodgers. Los Angeles scored in three separate innings, and Milwaukee matched or moved ahead in the bottom half of each one. The Brewers have now had the opponent strike first in five of their last six postseason games, and they’ve lost only once.
This one also had a different wrinkle: Milwaukee didn’t need to dig itself out of holes created by elite offense. It created some of those problems on its own.
William Contreras couldn’t corral a wild pitch that bounced off his chest protector in the first inning. Cooper Pratt failed to clean up a tricky hop on what should have been a double-play ball in the third.
Logan Henderson committed throwing errors in the third and fifth.
Those mistakes fit a postseason trend that has quietly hung over Milwaukee. The Brewers have already made seven errors this October. They’ve also flashed some excellent defense, so the overall picture is not as simple as the raw number suggests, but a club that usually prides itself on being crisp has made life harder than it needed to be.
“It was the way we just kept going. We kept competing,” Yelich said.
“We beat ourselves a little early in the game, would get up, get behind. It was just a lot of self-inflicted wounds.”
Henderson lasted four innings in his second postseason start, and the box score only tells part of the story. He wasn’t getting hammered, but the walks and miscues around him kept turning small problems into real ones.
“You walk the lead-off hitter, you threw a ball in the dirt with a man on second that kicked away-that's not a pitch that was called for in the dirt. Now he put himself in that jam,” Pat Murphy said.
“Then he throws the ball away to first on two different occasions. That's three runs that you give them.
That can't happen. That just can't happen.
But I believe in him, and I believe he'll correct it.”
While the Brewers were giving themselves extra work in the field, their lineup was grinding away at Yoshinobu Yamamoto. Contreras was the centerpiece, tying the game with a first-inning single, launching a fifth-inning homer, and then giving Milwaukee the lead for good with another single in the sixth.
The third inning was the swing point. Milwaukee forced Yamamoto out after a 36-pitch frame, and Jake Bauers turned his plate appearance into a full-on survival test. With two outs, he saw five of his six pitch types over 12 pitches, fouling off six straight before drawing a walk to load the bases.
“It just got to a certain point where it was straight compete mode,” Bauers said. “A little bit of [a] blackout, just kind of in the flow a little bit of competing.”
By the time Bauers reached base, Yamamoto looked visibly drained. He nearly hit Christian Yelich with the first pitch, then left a curveball over the plate and Yelich shot it up the middle for the go-ahead hit.
“That changes the game,” Murphy said. “You think about that and what it does to a pitcher.
He can get through an inning in less than seven minutes, and he does all the time. He's one of the best pitchers in the land.
It was a great at-bat. I think [it was] a turning point, I really do.”
“The deeper the at-bat got, I knew he was getting on, whether it be by hit or walk, whatever it may be,” Yelich said. “You want to follow a great at-bat like that with a good at-bat.”
That was the end of Yamamoto’s night. A year after being World Series MVP, he had been a nightmare for Milwaukee in the past, including last year’s NLCS Game 2 when he covered all 27 outs on 111 pitches. This time, he needed 75 pitches just to get eight outs.
From there, Milwaukee kept pressing as the Dodgers went to their bullpen. David Hamilton’s aggressive baserunning helped keep the pressure on, and Contreras delivered more big swings to push the Brewers through.
The bigger picture is hard to miss. Before the postseason began, Brewers players kept saying this year would not end the way past Octobers did.
They pointed back to last year’s NLCS sweep by the Dodgers and talked about being better prepared, more confident, and more determined. So far, they’ve backed it up.
This version of Milwaukee has looked different from the club that faded last October. The offense is wearing down elite pitchers.
The bullpen has been excellent, allowing one earned run in 28 ⅔ innings, which has helped cover for shorter outings from Henderson and Jacob Misiorowski. And when the pressure game hasn’t been enough by itself, timely homers from Contreras, Jackson Chourio, and Brice Turang have supplied the extra runs.
Murphy put it plainly.
“This year, they don't want to be denied,” Murphy said. “They're going against arguably one of the best teams in baseball ever put together, and they don't care. They won't be denied.”
Still, the Brewers know where the danger is. Against the Padres, they survived sloppy stretches and kept moving.
Against the Dodgers, that margin gets thinner. Los Angeles is the NL’s other 100-win team, and Milwaukee cannot keep handing it chances forever.
The finish line is still out there, and the Brewers have done this without playing their sharpest baseball. If they clean up the defense, they could punch their ticket to their first World Series since 1982 in just a few days.
“Keep going,” Contreras said. “The goal is not to think about where we're at.
Regardless of where we're going, who we're playing against, the goal is just to focus on doing our jobs and executing our jobs. That's the task at hand.
Just focusing on what's next.”
“We've got to keep going,” Yelich said. “We haven't accomplished anything yet.
It was a good start, but still a long way to go. They're a great team over there, and we know that we've got to continue to play well.”
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