'They Have a Belief': Brewers Found Themselves Again When It Mattered Most in Game 2 Comeback

The question posed to Pat Murphy before the Brewers' workout on Friday afternoon: to win playoff games, do you have to play in a way that forces the other team away from its strengths, or is excelling at what you do best good enough?

"That's the age-old question, right?" Murphy replied. "You got to do what you do well, and you got to understand what the other team can do well and how they're going to attack you, knowing how you play and what you do well. So it's that cat-and-mouse all the time, and you can only try to put yourself in the right positions."

The Brewers took a valiant crack at it in Game 1 of the NLDS, making excellent swing decisions against a Padres bullpen known for making hitters chase outside the strike zone. It ultimately took home runs from Jackson Chourio and William Contreras to score just enough in a tense series opener.

For most of Game 2, the Padres forced the Brewers away from their strengths and made them look like an entirely different team. Michael King's sequencing was masterful, and his changeup and breaking balls flummoxed a usually disciplined lineup. The Brewers chased 34% of King's pitches outside the zone and took too many fastballs for strikes.

Meanwhile, the Padres did what the Brewers usually do, forcing a starter to work for each out for a second straight game. They chased just 18% of the time against Logan Henderson, who settled in after a shaky first two innings to toss five competitive innings in his postseason debut. They also put more balls in play than Milwaukee, who committed three errors and botched a bunt coverage to allow two unearned runs. The Padres looked more like the Brewers than the Brewers—a fundamentally sound team having one of their sloppiest games of the year at the wrong time.

"We didn't play special," Murphy said. "When do you see us make four defensive miscues in a game in the infield?"

"We feel like we probably didn't play our best, cleanest game," Christian Yelich said. "It happens, though, and you just got to flush it."

That ties back to Murphy's answer on Friday. There's value in trying to combat the other team's strengths, but he came back to the same message he preaches daily in the clubhouse: control what you can control, respond to what the game gives you in the moment, and worry about nothing else.

"It comes down to being ready pitch-to-pitch and winning more pitches than not. And there's some parts of the game you can't control," Murphy said. "You can't control some parts of the game. And the ones you can control, you try to control, and you stay after it. Don't give up."

The Brewers took it pitch by pitch in the late innings. When the Padres unleashed flamethrowing closer Mason Miller in the eighth inning for a six-out save, they knew the assignment.

"Just grind, man," Yelich said. "Just find a way to get on [base] there."

"Guys like that don't give up multiple hits in innings very often," Sal Frelick said. "He was tasked with six outs today, so we wanted to kind of put the pressure on him."

Miller didn't give them opportunities to do that in the eighth, breezing through the heart of the order while throwing six of 12 pitches in the zone. In the ninth, those strikes turned into near misses, and the Brewers refused to bite. With one out, Yelich laid off multiple back-door sliders and drew a five-pitch walk. Frelick never swung as Miller danced around the edges of the zone for another walk. Then Murphy went to the bench, hitting veterans Andrew Vaughn and Gary Sánchez for Cooper Pratt and David Hamilton. Vaughn flied out, but like Frelick, Sánchez didn't swing, working back from a 2-2 count for a third walk.

"Honestly, it started with Gary," Frelick said. "When you see a guy like that do that and then pass the bat to Jackson, you kind of start to feel that momentum."

Having watched the inning unfold, Chourio stepped into a bases-loaded situation with a game plan: make Miller throw him a fastball for a strike, and be ready when he got it.

"Watching those at-bats, I knew he was a little bit erratic," Chourio said through interpreter Daniel de Mondesert. "I knew he was going to come at me with the fastball at some point, so mentally I was just making sure that I was prepared for that."

He got it on the first pitch and swung through it. He whiffed on another fastball right down the middle to fall into a 1-2 count. After fighting off a painted heater on the outside corner and laying off a low slider ("An unbelievable take," Yelich said), Chourio timed the next fastball perfectly, drilling a 110-MPH liner up the middle to walk it off.

"I think it's probably in the top three of the special moments I've had in my career," Chourio said.

"He loves those moments, and he knows how talented he is and what he can do on a baseball field," Yelich said. "He can do anything."

Chourio delivered the final punch, but Murphy emphasized that Frelick was the engine of the comeback, from his six-pitch walk to his tight rounding of third base to score the winning run on a hard line drive.

"That ball's smashed that Chourio hit," Murphy said, "and cutting that turn the way he did makes a difference in the game."

"This is the stuff we take pride in," Frelick said. "This is the stuff that we practice every day in spring training, is cutting the corner at third base and not getting too wide and how much time you lose. It's that attention to detail that is instilled in our culture."

To win the series, the Brewers were going to have to get to the Padres' bullpen at least once. They waited out Miller in one of their most disciplined innings of the season. It was an impressive response from a team that has struggled to recover from tough moments in past playoff games, a sign that this year's group is different from the others that fell short in October. Now, Milwaukee heads to San Diego in the driver's seat, one win away from a second straight trip to the NLCS.

"They have a belief," Murphy said. "That's what it is. They have a belief."

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