When They Play Clean Baseball, the Brewers Look Inevitable

The Brewers did what they've done all postseason: respond. For the fifth time in six games, the opposition scored first, but Milwaukee has only lost once. The Dodgers scored in three innings, and each time, the Brewers tied or took the lead in the bottom half of that very frame.

It didn't need to be a back-and-forth affair. None of the four runs Milwaukee allowed should have scored. William Contreras allowed a wild pitch to bounce off his chest protector in the first inning, Cooper Pratt couldn't knock down a tough hop on what should have been a double-play ball in the third, and Logan Henderson made throwing errors in both the third and the fifth.

Poor infield defense has been a theme. Errors are a small and incomplete measure of defense, but the Brewers have already committed seven this postseason. Because they've also made a handful of great plays, their fielding has probably been closer to a net zero, but a team that is usually fundamentally sound has made things harder for itself with those misplays.

"It was the way we just kept going. We kept competing," Yelich said. "We beat ourselves a little early in the game, would get up, get behind. It was just a lot of self-inflicted wounds."

Those wounds limited Henderson to four innings in his second postseason start. He wasn't hit hard in either outing, but walks and miscues have limited his success after an outstanding regular season.

"You walk the lead-off hitter, you threw a ball in the dirt with a man on second that kicked away—that's not a pitch that was called for in the dirt. Now he put himself in that jam," Pat Murphy said. "Then he throws the ball away to first on two different occasions. That's three runs that you give them. That can't happen. That just can't happen. But I believe in him, and I believe he'll correct it."

Meanwhile, the Brewers' offense went to work against Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who threw a one-run complete game in his last playoff outing at American Family Field. Contreras practically willed Milwaukee to victory, tying the game with a first-inning single and a fifth-inning home run before securing the lead for good with another single in the sixth.

The game's trajectory changed when the Brewers chased Yamamoto in a 36-pitch third inning. With two outs, Jake Bauers saw five of his six pitch types in a 12-pitch plate appearance, spoiling all of them with six straight foul balls before drawing a walk to load the bases.

"It just got to a certain point where it was straight compete mode," Bauers said. "A little bit of [a] blackout, just kind of in the flow a little bit of competing."

The seven-minute battle clearly took a chunk out of Yamamoto. After Bauers finally took ball four, the Dodgers' playoff superhero nearly hit Christian Yelich with a first-pitch fastball, then hung a curveball that Yelich lined up the middle for a go-ahead single.

"That changes the game," Murphy said. "You think about that and what it does to a pitcher. He can get through an inning in less than seven minutes, and he does all the time. He's one of the best pitchers in the land. It was a great at-bat. I think [it was] a turning point, I really do."

"The deeper the at-bat got, I knew he was getting on, whether it be by hit or walk, whatever it may be," Yelich said. "You want to follow a great at-bat like that with a good at-bat."

That was all for Yamamoto, who was the World Series MVP a year ago. In last year's NLCS, he recorded all 27 outs against the Brewers in Game 2 on just 111 pitches. This time, he needed 75 pitches for eight outs. From there, Milwaukee kept the pressure on as the Dodgers emptied their bullpen, with David Hamilton's aggressive baserunning and more big swings by Contreras putting them over the hump.

Before the postseason started, multiple Brewers insisted this year would be different from past disappointing Octobers. They said they learned from last year's NLCS sweep against the Dodgers and came back stronger, hungrier, and more confident. They're proving every night that it wasn't just talk.

The Brewers look different than the team that ran out of steam last postseason. Their offense is grinding down great pitching. Their bullpen has allowed one earned run in 28 ⅔ innings, making up for Henderson and Jacob Misiorowski's shorter-than-expected outings. They've even gotten timely home runs from Contreras, Jackson Chourio, and Brice Turang, to score enough runs when their pressure-focused style has fallen short. The Brewers feel inevitable, and they've undertaken their domination with businesslike determination.

"This year, they don't want to be denied," Murphy said. "They're going against arguably one of the best teams in baseball ever put together, and they don't care. They won't be denied."

When they have felt vulnerable, it was because they were beating themselves. The Brewers overcame misplays in the NLDS to eliminate the Padres, and they're on that path against the Dodgers. But the reality remains that Los Angeles, the NL's other 100-win team, will make them pay if they keep making mistakes. The margin for error is thinner than it was against the Padres, and it's not worth testing.

The job is far from finished, and the Brewers have gotten by without playing their best baseball. If they clean things up in the field, they could secure their first World Series berth since 1982 in a few days.

"Keep going," Contreras said. "The goal is not to think about where we're at. Regardless of where we're going, who we're playing against, the goal is just to focus on doing our jobs and executing our jobs. That's the task at hand. Just focusing on what's next."

"We've got to keep going," Yelich said. "We haven't accomplished anything yet. It was a good start, but still a long way to go. They're a great team over there, and we know that we've got to continue to play well."

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