The Brewers Are Hitting the Home Runs They Need to Win in the Postseason

[Jack Stern]

Image courtesy of Kirby Lee-Imagn Images

Playoff baseball is a different game. It trades in the six-month marathon of the regular season for a four-week sprint to win three or four short series. Teams face the best defenses and elite pitching, with dominant relievers throwing a greater share of innings. That’s why the run environment changes in October. Hits become harder to come by, and manufacturing runs becomes even more challenging.

This isn’t reflected only in overall offense (teams have scored 3.48 runs per game this postseason, a full run lower than in the regular season), but also in performance with runners on base. Since 2021, hitting with runners in scoring position has consistently dipped in October, and the rate of runners left on base has increased by about five percentage points in four of six seasons, including this year.

Season	RISP OPS (Regular Season)	LOB% (Regular Season)	RISP OPS (Postseason)	LOB% (Postseason)
2021	.755	72.1%	.735	74.3%
2022	.741	72.6%	.685	77.2%
2023	.755	71.9%	.717	77.7%
2024	.741	72.1%	.692	74.8%
2025	.745	72.3%	.732	77.1%
2026	.743	72.3%	.648	76.8%

The Brewers have been no exception. They led baseball in OPS with runners in scoring position this year, but entering Game 3 of the NLCS, they had stranded significantly more runners in scoring position in the postseason. That hasn’t been because they stopped having the same patient, smart at-bats they did in the regular season. The Brewers were actually making more contact, hitting the ball harder, and drawing more walks with runners in scoring position. They'd simply run into better pitching, better defense, and tough luck in a small sample.

Split	RISP wOBA	LOB%	RISP xwOBA	RISP BB%	RISP K%
Regular Season	.344	67.8%	.320	11.8%	21.8%
Postseason	.313	80.0%	.335	15.5%	15.5%

This is why home runs become even more critical to success in October. You don’t get many mistake pitches against the game’s best arms, so you have to make them count. There’s also no time for bad luck to even out in a short series, but a ball hit well over the fence will never find a glove and will score at least one run.

That’s why the Brewers, who scored the second-most runs but hit the second-fewest homers in baseball, once again faced questions about how their offense would fare. Their pressure-centric brand of baseball—stacking singles and walks and moving runners a base or two at a time—doesn’t work as well in the postseason, and it hasn’t this year. To make a deep run, they needed to hit more home runs.

They’ve done just that. After leaving the yard three times in a Game 3 comeback win, Milwaukee tied the Dodgers as the team with the most homers this postseason. The Brewers have hit eight long balls this October, including five in this series. The Braves, Guardians, and White Sox have also played seven games this October. The Braves hit six home runs, the Guardians have hit five, and the White Sox hit four.

Most of those home runs have redirected momentum toward the Brewers. In Game 1 of the NLDS, Jackson Chourio’s two-run blast off Robbie Ray tied it after Jacob Misiorowski’s shaky start, and William Contreras’s solo shot a few innings later was the game-winning run. Brice Turang and Contreras hit game-tying homers in Games 1 and 2 against the Dodgers. On Wednesday, the Brewers scored all but one run against a dominant Blake Snell on home runs. Chourio blasted Snell’s first pitch to give them an early lead, and Jake Bauers and Garrett Mitchell chased him with back-to-back blasts in a comeback seventh inning.

That inning epitomized what the Brewers needed to do to get over the hump this October: execute their existing approach to grind down opposing pitchers, then crush the mistake pitch when they got it. Snell cruised through six innings on 81 pitches, and Abner Uribe had squandered a 1-0 lead and a great Robert Gasser start in an erratic bottom of the sixth. With the heart of the order due up, the Brewers needed long plate appearances and a big swing.

Andrew Vaughn led off the seventh with a seven-pitch walk, not swinging until the count reached 3-2. That brought up Bauers, who worked a 12-pitch walk to help chase Yoshinobu Yamamoto in the third inning of Game 2. Bauers didn’t swing until Snell’s fourth pitch, a 2-1 changeup, then began fouling off secondary pitches while waiting for a mistake fastball. By the 10th pitch, Snell was running out of steam; he hung a slider right down the middle, and although Bauers was early, he got a bat on it and hooked it foul down the right-field line.

The next pitch was even worse: a four-seamer right down the middle. It was a questionable pitch call after Bauers was ahead of a center-cut slider, but it was even worse execution. It was the kind of mistake a pitcher makes when he’s on fumes. On the 11th pitch of another grueling fight, Bauers got the fastball he’d been waiting for, and he didn’t miss it. With a screaming 412-foot fly ball to right and a bat toss, the Brewers had the lead.

Snell’s next pitch to Garrett Mitchell was a non-competitive fastball that missed inside, followed by a changeup down the middle. Mitchell made even louder contact than Bauers, crushing a 428-foot blast that ended the left-hander’s night. The Brewers didn’t look back, as DL Hall and Trevor Megill retired 11 of the last 12 hitters they faced, putting Milwaukee one win away from the pennant.

Against tough postseason pitching, the Brewers have (predictably) chased more in October, but most of their rallies have started with spurts of the patience that made them great in the regular season. The difference-maker has been hitting home runs when they force mistakes with those pesky at-bats. The Brewers have married their scrappy approach with the extra slug they needed to win in October, and it’s brought them to the precipice of their second World Series appearance.

View full article

[PBTank]

Thanks Jack.  Did anyone get much sleep last night. Lots of caffeine today to get me through today I’m predicting.