The Milwaukee Brewers have spent all season making one thing look easy: winning. At 102-59, they’re set to finish with the best record in Major League Baseball, and they’ve already broken the franchise record for wins in a single season. That’s true even though they never put together a winning streak longer than five games.
Now comes the part they haven’t sorted out yet. Jacob Misiorowski and Logan Henderson are lined up to start the first two games for Milwaukee in each postseason series, but the Brewers still haven’t settled on a Game 3 starter. For a team this successful, that uncertainty says plenty about how the rest of the rotation has performed.
Dustin May is one name in the mix. Milwaukee picked him up before the trade deadline, and while the results haven’t been especially strong - he’s 2-2 with a 5.65 ERA in 10 starts - he did give the club something to think about Saturday night. May went three innings, allowed two runs and struck out five.
“I don’t know,” Brewers pitching coach Chris Hook said when asked if May could start a Game Three in the postseason. “I think we’ll have that conversation about who goes where on Monday.
I really don’t know where most guys are going to fit. Our group will get together and we’ll talk through that.
The biggest thing for him is to come out of this one in a good spot, like, ‘Now I feel like I’m ready to do this.’ That’s No. 1 for me.”
Robert Gasser is another possibility, and maybe the one that will catch the eye of fans most quickly. He turned in six innings of one-run ball on Friday night and set a career-high with nine strikeouts. That outing came on the heels of seven shutout innings against the Baltimore Orioles earlier in the week, giving him back-to-back quality starts.
For the season, Gasser is 5-5 with a 3.87 ERA in 21 games, including 20 starts.
Manager Pat Murphy said the decision will come down to a full look at the group and the circumstances around the series.
“I guess we’ve got to break it down and really sit down and look at everybody’s health, where they’re at, how we’re going to go about the series. Who we’re playing, it matters.”
Right now, Milwaukee is set to face either the Chicago Cubs or the San Diego Padres in the NLDS, and that opponent could end up shaping how the Brewers line up their rotation.
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