In a Game of Inches, Little Things Swung Back in Brewers' Favor in Series-Evening Win Over Pirates

Baseball is a game of inches, a truism that takes on added significance in close games. When the Brewers dropped a seesaw series opener to the Pirates by a 6-5 score, Pat Murphy bemoaned that the little things did not go his team’s way, sometimes by their own doing.

There were several plays to circle in a one-run loss. In the fifth inning, Jackson Chourio chased two up-and-in fastballs from Chase Shugart, who was struggling to find the strike zone. He hit a soft liner to the mound that Joey Ortiz read poorly, resulting in a double play that quashed a potential rally.

In the eighth, Brice Turang was initially ruled safe on an infield single that moved the tying run into scoring position and placed the go-ahead run on base with one out. Replay showed that catcher Joey Bart’s throw beat Turang, who lunged toward the base with his final stride, by a hair. The call was overturned.

In the ninth, Jake Bauers rapped a hard line drive around the wrong side of the foul pole, just missing a walk-off home run. Two pitches later, Caleb Durbin had second base stolen, but overslid the base and was tagged out.

The Pirates, meanwhile, outhit the Brewers 15 to 9, even though Milwaukee finished with a .290 expected batting average compared to Pittsburgh’s .214. Isiah Kiner-Falefa tucked a triple down the line with a .280 xBA—one that Sal Frelick bobbled as it skipped off the wall—to drive in the game-winning run in the sixth.

“Every little [thing],” Murphy said. “Balls foul by an inch, Durbin steals the base and overslides, Turang at first, a perfectly-placed triple in the corner by Kiner-Falefa. One of those days.”

One night later, Milwaukee evened the series to set up the Jacob Misiorowski-Paul Skenes tilt as a rubber match. While increased hard contact and more extra-base hits were the main catalysts of the 9-3 victory, as they have been throughout much of the team’s current run, it was the inches favoring the Brewers in a tense second inning that positioned the offense to pull away.

After a soft one-hopper got past Caleb Durbin for the first of three singles that loaded the bases against Freddy Peralta with no outs, he was quick enough on a slow bouncer to record the force at home for the first out. After Peralta struck out Kiner-Falefa, Isaac Collins, who leads all outfielders in feet covered within the first three seconds of a ball’s flight, ended the inning with a sliding catch by getting another great jump.

“Underrated,” Murphy said of the sequence. “People who came to the game, they might have forgotten that. I think that’s obviously the difference in the game.”

The Brewers won’t win on the margins every night, but for the better part of a month, they’ve exhibited more of the traits that served them well last year. They’re covering the extra inches in the field to make plays, and they’re responding quickly when things go against them. And they're closing the gap in the NL Central, enough that it feels more like a game of inches than it did a month ago.