Brewers Down 0-2, Bats Need to Wake Up with their Season on the Brink

After vanquishing the rival Cubs in the NLDS, the Brewers flew the L and moved on to the National League Championship Series to do battle with the Los Angeles Dodgers, excitement and optimism at max level. Then, L.A. starting pitchers Blake Snell and Yoshinobu Yamamoto poured an olympic swimming pool-sized amount of water on the Crew’s momentum, going a combined 17 innings over the first two games with 17 strikeouts while only allowing four hits, one earned run, and one walk. Enter all the cliches you can think of about the fat lady not singing yet (Lord knows we could use a Uecker-ism right about now), but the $321M hill to climb that is the Dodgers roster just became a mountain, especially when realizing they’re now 22-6 in their last 28 games.

Game 1’s loss was tough to bear but still carried optimism. Blake Snell is a two-time Cy Young award winner, so when he’s pitching well, he can literally be as good as anyone. The Brewers countered with a bullpen game, starting with Aaron Ashby who was relieved after one inning in favor of Quinn Priester, who then handed off to Chad Patrick. Milwaukee kept their heads down, fought until the very last out, and were a hit-by-pitch away from tying the game in the bottom of the ninth. (Side note: I don’t fully fault Brice Turang for getting out of the way of that pitch. Unless you’re a team that has “wearing one” as a mantra and ideology, it’s tough in a split second for your brain to tell you not to avoid getting hit. I wonder how many people complaining are guys that struggle to get off their couch to put on their good sweatpants because company’s coming over.)

A bullpen game against a Cy Young winner, who pitches as good of a game as you’ll see, and you almost steal a victory anyway? You got to the bullpen and kept the line moving, never giving up hope? Fantastic to see, and a great way to enter Game 2. That is, until Yamamoto showed up. He gave up a leadoff homer to Jackson Chourio (who at only age 21 already has a playoff career average of .361 with four home runs and 11 RBIs across 10 games, by the way) but then settled in so well that he ended the game himself, not letting up another run the rest of the contest across 111 pitches. Brewers pitching wasn’t bad per say, only looking worse in comparison to the Dodgers performances.

With the L.A. putting out 6’8” Tyler Glasnow to start tonight’s Game 3, the Brewers have yet to announce their pitching plan as of this writing. It sounds like an Ashby start followed by Jose Quintana bulk relief strategy could be in play, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a healthy dose of fireballer Jacob Misiorowski, either. More than that though, the bats need to wake up in a big way. The Brewers can’t win while only scoring one run each game, and they need to try and get to the Dodgers’ bullpen early. Christian Yelich has zero home runs and zero RBIs in his last 58 postseason at-bats going back to 2020, with only a .192 average in this year’s playoffs. William Contreras has only two hits in his last 17 at-bats going back to the Cubs series. They need to set the tone tonight and can’t leave the field without a victory.In the meantime, I’ll try not to get too down just yet. After all, Austin Murphy has me sold, so here’s to hoping Milwaukee starts to steady the ship later this evening.

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