Usually Relentless Brewers Bowed Out Quietly in NLCS Sweep

The parallel was striking. With the Brewers needing everything to go right to keep their season alive, they started a pitcher who needed to be nearly perfect to succeed.

At this stage of his career, José Quintana is a capable back-of-the-rotation starter—at least in the regular season. His 3.96 ERA this year was deceiving, though. Quintana's strikeout, walk, ground ball, and hard-hit rates were all well below average, translating to a 5.47 Deserved Run Average (DRA). He would need both pinpoint location on the edges of the strike zone and great defense behind him to tame a potent Dodgers lineup.

Unsurprisingly, Quintana wasn't perfect. He allowed three runs on six hits, while recording just six outs. He wasn't the reason Milwaukee's storybook 2025 season ended on Friday night, though. He was pitching in a do-or-die situation, after his teammates dropped the first three games of the series.

Each moment in a baseball game carries some impact (great or small) on a team's likelihood of winning. Pinning a victory or loss exclusively on any player, group, or play is a futile exercise. The Brewers' most glaring and undeniable shortcoming in the series, though, was their lack of offense.

Blake Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow, and Shohei Ohtani were fantastic. Most lineups would have fared poorly, given how well each of those four pitched, but many groups (including plenty of alternate-universe versions of this one) would have done better than Milwaukee's .119/.191/.193 line in the series. By OPS, that was the fifth-worst four-game stretch of postseason offense by any team in the modern era.

Hanging crooked numbers on those starters may not have been realistic, but averaging one run per game simply was not good enough. Part of the job in the postseason is having competitive plate appearances against great pitchers and making them work for each out. The Brewers did precisely that for much of the regular season, inflating pitch counts by refusing to chase and making frequent contact. Those strengths disintegrated in the NLCS, save for a few fleeting moments scattered throughout the series.

A similar story played out each night. Milwaukee hitters chased, whiffed, and did not look remotely competitive during the vast majority of their plate appearances. For whatever reason, they continued to swing at torrents of offspeed pitches from Snell and Yamamoto as if they were fastballs, rendering what was already a challenging task impossible. Even after getting into a vulnerable bullpen a bit earlier in Games 3 and 4, they did little to apply pressure to those relievers.

For a team that prided itself on playing relentlessly and bouncing back from adversity, it was a jarring finish. The 2025 Brewers overcame the worst 0-4 start in MLB history and a record that remained below .500 until May 28 to win a franchise-record 97 regular-season games and secure home-field advantage throughout the postseason. All of a sudden, they stopped punching back. With the outs ticking down on their season, Ohtani sent Pat Murphy's Average Joes packing with a historic performance. Their season ended as meekly as it began.

As he labored for six outs in an elimination game, Quintana was an emblem of the roster flanking him: a group of bona fide big-leaguers that was greater than the sum of its parts in a fantastic regular season, but not good enough in October to reach the postseason finish line. Now the Brewers find themselves in the familiar position of reviewing why things failed to work on a bigger stage, and what (if anything) they should have done differently.

That's been the catch associated with Milwaukee's sustained regular-season dominance. When a team punches its ticket to the postseason, it also incurs the high likelihood of a disappointing exit. Any outcome other than a championship will sting, and prompt tough questions. Zooming out, this group still deserves credit for its accomplishments, and next year's team should get another bite at the apple. For many, though, that may not ease the immediate frustration of another season falling short of the ultimate goal.