After a Gut-Punch Loss in World Series Game 4, Brewers Must Bounce Back Once More to Win First Championship

Some nights just aren't your night. That had only been the case once for the Brewers this October, but some good old-fashioned baseball cruelty finally caught them on Tuesday night at Tropicana Field, in Game 4 of the World Series. For a team and fanbase starving for its first championship, it was particularly cruel.

It started with the Brewers' at-bats against Griffin Jax. Starting an elimination game for the Rays, the veteran got eight whiffs and four strikeouts with his changeup, but Milwaukee hitters crushed most balls in play against him. Nine of the Brewers' 10 batted balls against Jax had an exit velocity of at least 95 miles per hour, but due to poor placement and great Tampa Bay defense, they scratched across just two runs on four hits.

That poor luck continued for much of the night. The Brewers hit nine batted balls with an exit velocity of at least 102 MPH for outs, and they had four outs with expected batting averages of at least .700. That included Jake Bauers's sharp third-inning flyout, which Statcast said would have been a two-run home run in 13 ballparks—including American Family Field.

The Rays, meanwhile, scored two runs against Dustin May without hitting a ball harder than 87.2 MPH. Exit velocity alone doesn't tell the whole story—Chandler Simpson's RBI double in the second wasn't hit hard, but he pulled a mistake sweeper from May down the right-field line—but the Brewers were hitting better than the Rays. It just wasn't creating more runs.

Milwaukee did enough to keep pace with Tampa Bay, tying the game in the fourth on a Cooper Pratt double and again in the fifth on a David Hamilton home run. But without the breakthrough hit, a 2-2 stalemate continued into the late innings. By then, Nick Martinez and the Rays' best relievers were throwing strikes around the edges of the zone and silencing Brewers hitters more convincingly.

"I don't think we had poor at-bats at the end," Pat Murphy said. "I think we didn't punch out too much, but we had a couple checked-swing strikeouts. Sometimes that's a result of hitting a ball really, really hard and it gets caught. We're human, too. We've played really good baseball."

The Brewers had a chance against Tampa Bay closer Bryan Baker, when Pratt singled for his third hit of the night. After Chandler Simpson made a leaping catch at the left-field wall to snag Garrett Mitchell's hard fly ball, Murphy fired his best bullet off the bench, hitting Andrew Vaughn for David Hamilton. As a four-seam and changeup pitcher with a high arm slot, Baker is precisely the kind of right-hander Vaughn sees well.

He only saw two pitches. On the second, Pratt tried to steal second. It made some sense: Baker is slow to the plate, and Pratt needed to be in scoring position for a potential base hit. However, he was ruled out upon review, as an on-the-money throw led second baseman Richie Palacios right into Pratt's trailing hand. The inning was over, and because Joey Ortiz now needed to replace Hamilton at third base, the Brewers had burned Vaughn without getting him an at-bat. The tie stretched into extra innings, as both teams emptied their bullpens.

Despite all that went wrong, the Brewers still seemed to answer for good in the 12th. Pratt led off the inning against Ian Seymour, launching a hanging sweeper for a go-ahead home run. The Brewers were three outs away from their first World Series title, and their 22-year-old shortstop had etched a permanent entry in the franchise history book.

Instead, things unraveled in the bottom half of the inning. Because Murphy used Trevor Megill for a one-batter matchup with Yandy Díaz in the eighth and Aaron Ashby's velocity dipped in the 11th, Antonio Senzatela and Shane Drohan had to close out a championship. Senzatela jammed Junior Caminero for a leadoff ground ball to third, but Ortiz (in the game because Vaughn pinch-hit) short-hopped a throw Jake Bauers couldn't pick.

"I got to make that play," Ortiz said. "There's just no excuse about it."

With that, Senzatela gave way to Drohan for the lefties in the middle of the order. But this was the second-half version of Drohan, who traded his once-dominant four-seamer for a new sinker as his primary fastball. The sinker's shape and performance improved down the stretch, but to record crucial October outs, he needed that elevated four-seamer in his back pocket for whiffs.

Drohan threw 15 pitches. Thirteen were sinkers, including his first five pitches to Liam Hicks. Drohan induced a ground ball, but it was hit hard and snuck past a shifted Pratt for a single.

"With no outs and a guy on, you're trying to get a ground ball," Drohan said. "Got it, it just sucks that we were shifted."

With runners on first and third and nobody out on the road, Drohan needed a strikeout. After Johnny DeLuca swung through an elevated sinker, Drohan and William Contreras tried a slider instead of a high four-seamer. He missed his spot, and DeLuca punched it up the middle for a game-tying single. Chandler Simpson and Ben Williamson then saw six straight sinkers, adding two more hits to walk it off.

Even though his sinker improved down the stretch, the fact is that Drohan threw his inferior fastball almost exclusively. Even in two-strike counts, he and William Contreras kept throwing a pitch with little swing-and-miss to it, leaving Drohan vulnerable to balls getting through the infield. The sinker induced two ground balls, but both were hard-hit.

"Just went at them with good sinkers, and they slapped it around," Drohan said.

"If the first guy hits a ground-ball double play, we're not even talking about it," Murphy said of the pitch usage.

It was the final blow in a night where little went Milwaukee's way. Hitting the ball hard didn't work. Substitutions didn't work. Drohan's sinker didn't work. A blowout win in Game 3 put the Brewers on the verge of a surprisingly swift World Series sweep, but now, they'll have to work a bit harder. The bullpen is drained. Their approaches have been tested. Their defense cracked again.

"I think the guys understand it's going to be hard," Murphy said. "You're playing the best team in the American League. They proved it all year long, and they came up big today. It's going to be hard."

Make no mistake, the Brewers remain in the driver's seat. Since the League Championship Series became a best-of-seven in 1985, no team has swept both the LCS and World Series. Tuesday night's debacle only prevented Milwaukee from making history in one trivial way; they're still likely to make a more important kind. In their best season as a franchise, they've handled everything and everyone the year has thrown their way. It's fitting that they'll have to overcome one more gut punch to seal the deal.

"I trust our guys. I trust them," Murphy said. "They put themselves in a position to win."

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