Sweet Suffocation: Brewers Pitching Staff Squeezes Life From Rays in Comeback Game 2 Win

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Game 2 of the World Series began as inauspiciously as possible for the Brewers. Logan Henderson did a decent job of working high and low against Rays designated hitter Yandy Díaz and eventually got him to knock a diving changeup straight into the dirt. The ball died on its way to Cooper Pratt, though, and rolled (rather than bouncing) the final several feet to him. Thrown off by the awkward contact, Pratt made a bad throw, and Jake Bauers could offer him no assistance. Instead of an easy out, the game opened with a runner in scoring position for Tampa Bay.

Everything spiraled on Henderson for a bit after that. He struck out Jonathan Aranda, but on a 1-1 fastball, Chandler Simpson lined a single into left-center field, scoring Díaz. The Rays had jumped out to a quick lead, and one of the game's fastest players was on base. Simpson stole second. Junior Caminero, after spoiling several pitches, got a changeup that Henderson left up and lashed another single through the left side, scoring Simpson. Henderson jumped ahead 0-1 with a good fastball to Liam Hicks, but then he threw him a cutter. Henderson's cutter is the fourth-best pitch in a two-pitch arsenal. It's just not good. Occasionally, it must be thrown to keep hitters honest when they have something figured out with regard to his lethal fastball-changeup combination, but Henderson should never throw a hitter an 0-1 cutter in their first at-bat against him in a game. It was the wrong pitch, and it was executed woefully. Hicks punished him mercilessly, doubling the Tampa lead.

At that moment, the Rays had three hard-hit (95+ MPH of exit velocity) balls with a launch angle above 0°. The next one they got came in the fifth inning, when Aranda cracked a double against Dustin May. The one after that will come sometime this week in St. Petersburg. Henderson had felt the building pressure of the inning, until Hicks blew things open. The release of that homer was devastating, but it was still a release. Thereafter, Henderson settled down—and the Rays never got another breath. The Brewers' formidable pitching staff wrapped around them like a boa constrictor and squeezed the life out of them.

Hicks went deep on the 25th pitch Henderson threw. Of those, 19 had been either his four-seamer or his cutter. From that point forward, though, Henderson and the other five pitchers who appeared for Milwaukee threw 69 fastballs (counting cutters) and 63 non-fastballs. Heat made up just 52.3% of the Brewers hurlers' mix after Hicks's homer, which is unusual: 66.4% of the team's pitches were heaters this year.

The Rays were hunting those fastballs, but they stopped getting them. Henderson got two whiffs on changeups from Richie Palacios en route to a strikeout, and though he left a change a bit up to Johnny DeLuca, he had DeLuca far enough out in front to induce a harmless flyout and get out of the inning.

In the second, Henderson worked backward with a runner in scoring position, getting ahead of both Díaz and Aranda with changeups and finishing them off with high heaters. He'd locked his command back in, but just as importantly, he had flipped his sequences, and the Rays were in the rocking chair. He sailed through the third inning (and second look at the heart of the Tampa order), too, with a pattern that became easy to read for outsiders but impossible to counter for batters: changes to get ahead, then high fastballs for the righties and fading changeups for the lefties. He just trusted his arm speed, and the outs piled up without trouble.

Because he'd burned so many pitches and taken so much damage in the first, though, Henderson didn't have any more leash. Pat Murphy turned to his bullpen in the fourth inning, trailing by two runs and staring at a left-handed lane in the Rays lineup that cried out for JoJo Romero. The sturdy southpaw loaded up both Palacios and Victor Mesa Jr. with sweepers, on which they made easy outs. He got a bit unlucky when DeLuca tapped a sweeper so weakly that it became an infield single, but ended up escaping the inning by dropping in a backdoor sweeper to punch out Taylor Walls.

The Brewers offense was slowly, steadily working its way back into the game. By the end of the fourth, they had closed the deficit to 4-3, and the momentum was all running in their direction. Dustin May only threw fastballs in his glimpse of the top of the Rays order, but he threw all three flavors of them and got Díaz, Simpson and Caminero on a trio of very weakly hit grounders. In the middle of that, Aranda did crack a double, but May brought the power just when the team needed to overpower Tampa's best bats. It was reminiscent of Game 2 of the NLCS, when May relieved Henderson directly and defused a Dodgers rally that (briefly) put them back ahead of the Crew. This appears to be the role in which May can thrive right now: one inning against the right pocket of the lineup, letting it eat.

Once—just once—there was real danger that the Rays would tack onto the lead they had. In the top of the sixth, DL Hall got a lot of help from the Rays themselves. After he hit Hicks to start the inning, Palacios laid down a sacrifice bunt. The Rays have been avid bunters this year, leveraging not only their contact-oriented approach at the plate but the speed and bunting skills of their hitters. Palacios never had a chance to reach, though, as David Hamilton handled the bunt readily and smoothly. That was one free out. After Hall struck out DeLuca (working backward again: sliders to set him up, a sinker to blow him away), he got to a 1-1 count against Mesa, then threw a sinker that ran right back over the middle of the plate. We talked before the series about the need to avoid doing exactly that against Mesa. The resulting batted ball was a grounder, but it was well-struck and went straight through, to left fielder Jackson Chourio. Hicks, running from second, tried to score on the hard-hit ball. That was a mistake, and Chourio's accurate throw punished him for it. Hall wasn't sharp, but he escaped the situation, thanks both to some good inverted approaches and to some good luck.

The rest of the way, there would be no need for defensive heroics. Hall came closest to giving up damaging contact, and it was just that hard ground ball-turned-outfield assist. Abner Uribe came on in the seventh and (inexplicably) walked the hapless Walls, but then he went to work on Díaz, hammering him with sliders down and away. Even a brilliantly well-organized swing can only hope for a single on the stuff with which Uribe peppered Díaz, and the hurler executed so well that even that didn't turn out to be feasible. Díaz struck out. Uribe bullied Aranda with sheer velocity, but got him out when he moved his buzzing sinker from the middle of the plate to off the plate away; the would-be slugger hit it right into the ground. Another firm pitch below the zone got Simpson to hit the only kind of grounder on which he isn't dangerous: medium-speed, right to the first baseman.

By the time Uribe returned to the mound for the top of the eighth, the Brewers led by a run. At that point, he just needed to keep them down. He threw five straight sliders to Caminero, got a groundout on the last of them, and made way for Aaron Ashby. The team's relief ace struck out pinch-hitting lefty-masher Ryan Vilade with a changeup running off the plate from him, and he forced Palacios to hit the ball right into the ground on a slider. Inning over.

DeLuca was, for most of the night, the toughest out in the Rays lineup, and he led off the ninth with a double when Ashby hung a curveball at the top of the zone. No biggie. Ashby then got Mesa to chase a slider in the dirt for out No. 1 in the inning (and 25 in the game, for the Crew's hurlers). He fed pinch-hitter Ben Williamson a steady diet of changeups and got another weak grounder. That swung things, once more, to Díaz. More changeups ensued. Finally, Ashby put Díaz away with a curveball down, and it was over. The Brewers had won 5-4, and while the lion's share of the credit can go to their resilient and balanced offense, the pitching staff did the most impressive work. After Hicks homered, the Rays were stymied. The Brewers' plans and their talent just overwhelmed a good-not-great offense, when it needed to do so more than ever.

Henderson, Romero, May, Hall, Uribe and Ashby racked up 10 total strikeouts, but those weren't the most telling at-bats. They also got 10 outs from Rays hitters on grounders with a launch angle below -15°—the kinds of choppers that hardly ever become any kind of trouble. The highest number of outs recorded on balls hit that way in a game, this year, was 12. It was done twice, by the Rockies and Tigers, respectively. Both times, they were facing the Rays.

The Brewers used a very different plan than the Rays were ready for in Game 2. They induced an extraordinary number of weak, easy infield outs, by studying what worked for other teams in the past—but also by simply veering away from what Tampa was expecting. It became an all-hands effort; that's fine. The Brewers only need two more wins to become World Series champions. If that happens, Game 2 might well be remembered for the offensive heroics and as a bit of a slog. It should also be remembered, though, as a microcosm of this team. They were smothering; they were ingenious; they were surprising; and they became inevitable. The Rays offense got to Henderson big and loud and fast, and then everything got very, very quiet. One by one, the Brewers took the air out of the lungs of Rays batters. They dominated them, with teamwork and intelligence. They made an early hole seem escapable and a late lead seem insurmountable. They won in a narrow but utterly decisive fashion, and they head to Florida with their opponents gasping for a restorative breath that might never come.