After Another Dodgers Starter Dominated Them, Brewers Face Daunting NLCS Deficit

[Jack Stern]

Image courtesy of © Michael McLoone-Imagn Images

After Blake Snell left the Brewers looking like an entirely different offense in Game 1 of the NLCS, they looked even worse the following night. After Jackson Chourio’s leadoff home run on Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s first pitch, Yamamoto silenced them the rest of the way, tossing a complete game as the Dodgers breezed to a 5-1 win.

Snell needed just 103 pitches to cruise through 24 outs; Yamamoto went the distance on 111 pitches. Against Snell, the Brewers chased 33% of out-of-zone pitches and whiffed on 45% of their swings; they whiffed less against Yamamoto but chased a whopping 40% of pitches outside the zone.

“We chased way more than we’ve chased all year,” Pat Murphy said. “We’ve been the best in baseball at not chasing. These pitchers brought out the worst in us.”

During Snell’s outing, the Brewers looked unprepared for the changeup-heavy mix he used—one he implemented in the anticipation that they would try to jump on his fastball. Against Yamamoto, it was an even more glaring version of the same issue.

Their swing decisions against the right-hander’s four-seam fastball—an aggressive 72% in-zone swing rate and a modest 22% chase rate—were solid. The problem was that Milwaukee hitters looked as though they were seeing a fastball out of the hand on most pitches, even though Yamamoto only threw his four-seamer and two-seamer a combined 32% of the time.

That allowed him to carve through their lineup with his splitter and curveball. Several Brewers hitters, perhaps seeing those curveballs as fastballs, gave up on ones that started above the zone and dropped in for strikes. Meanwhile, they chased 52% of splitters outside the zone, seemingly misidentifying them as heaters before they dove beneath their knees.

“This guy’s split looks like a heater,” Murphy said. “Comes out of the same tunnel. It looks exactly the same. He’s got an impeccable delivery. He doesn’t miss a lot. And the ball shows up as a heater—bang, goes down.”

“It was moving late,” said Christian Yelich, who chased back-to-back splitters below the zone in a fourth-inning strikeout as part of an 0-for-4 night. “He did a good job of setting it up a lot, setting up his pitches. It’s good sequencing. He just made it tough on us, keeping everybody off balance. He was doing a really good job of landing it at the bottom and going just below that. Same with the breaking balls.”

Through the first four innings, Yamamoto induced a 52% chase rate. The Brewers chased less and showed signs of trying to adjust during their third and fourth turns against him, but they remained caught in between his fastball and splitter pairing.

“He kind of approached each at-bat differently,” Yelich said. “It wasn’t really the same attack plan every time.”

After dropping the first two games, the odds are stacked heavily against the Brewers as the series moves to Los Angeles. Teams that took a 2-0 lead in a best-of-seven series have gone on to win that series 84% of the time. To advance to the World Series, Milwaukee must buck history while playing three games on the road in three days, and counting on Jacob Misiorowski and José Quintana to record a significant number of outs.

“I understand that 90% of teams that have been in this situation don’t win the series,” Murphy said. “But this team has been counted out a lot this year, and I think there’s some fight left in them.”

The Brewers showed in Game 1 that they can make life difficult for an unstable Dodgers bullpen, but exploiting that relief corps requires getting past the starter. That won’t get much easier against Tyler Glasnow and Shohei Ohtani, who will start Games 3 and 4, respectively. Glasnow does not throw a changeup, but Ohtani has improved his splitter shape this year and could deploy it more than usual after his teammates’ success.

“We’ve got to take better at-bats,” Jackson Chourio said through translator Daniel de Mondesert. “That’s kind of where it begins.”

“It seems like you can go an entire game without seeing a pitch over the heart of the plate, so obviously, it’s tough,” said Jake Bauers. “That being said, we’ve got to take it upon ourselves to try and do something to disrupt their timing and get them a little bit more uncomfortable on the mound.”

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[Jason Wang]

Man this rotation is gross. Went from facing a 6'4 lefty with 2 Cy Youngs and a wicked changeup to facing a 5'10 righty with 3 Sawamura Awards and a disgusting yo-yo curve/splitter combo that's a misdemeanor crime in 14 states.

Ridiculous.

To the Brewers' credit, they're still making these games pretty competitive but man, three hits and one walk in Game 2 makes me nervous at best for the rest of the series. Good thing they're out of good starting pitching (just gotta face a 6'8 righty with a career 30.9% strikeout rate and the greatest baseball talent the world has ever seen)!