It took one pitch for the Milwaukee Brewers to remind everyone why they won 103 games this season, and eleven pitches to remind everyone why October is the cruelest month in baseball.
On a tense Wednesday night at Dodger Stadium, the Brewers clawed back from a late deficit and ripped the defending champions apart, winning 6-2 in Game 3 of the National League Championship Series. They now lead the series 3-0. One more win and Milwaukee is going to the World Series for the first time in 44 years, dethroning the two-time defending champions in the process.
Only one team in baseball history has ever come back from 3-0 in a best-of-seven series. You know who they were.
Chourio struck before the crowd sat down
Jackson Chourio did not wait for the moment. He ambushed it. On the very first pitch of the game, a fastball from Blake Snell that caught too much of the middle of the plate, Chourio drove it over the right-field fence for a leadoff home run.
According to MLB’s pitch-tracking records, it was only the 17th time since 1988 that a leadoff hitter has homered on the first pitch of a postseason game. And here is the part that should worry Dodger fans: Chourio did the exact same thing to this exact team in Game 2 of last year’s NLCS, taking Yoshinobu Yamamoto deep on the first pitch. Back-to-back Octobers, first pitch of the game, over the fence against Los Angeles.
Snell steadied himself after that, retiring 14 straight Brewers at one point. For five innings, the 1-0 margin held, and it felt like a classic October pitching duel was developing.
Rookie Gasser did not blink
Milwaukee’s rookie left-hander Robert Gasser was the quiet hero of the early innings. He scattered three hits across five scoreless frames, matching Snell punch for punch and keeping the Dodgers’ lineup guessing all night.
The Dodgers had their chances. They put their leadoff batter on base in four of the first six innings but could not cash in, stranding runner after runner. Through two games, LA had managed just eight total hits, and the frustration was starting to show.
The sixth inning almost changed everything
Gasser was lifted for Abner Uribe to open the sixth, and the move nearly blew up on Milwaukee. Uribe walked three of the first four batters he faced, including Shohei Ohtani, loading the bases with one out. Dodgers catcher Will Smith, mired in a 1-for-25 postseason slump, finally broke through, doubling off the wall in left-center for a 2-1 lead.
For a few minutes, Dodger Stadium believed. The two-time defending champions were going to steal this game and claw back into the series.
The belief lasted about one half inning.
Eleven pitches, one swing, total destruction
Andrew Vaughn drew a walk to open the seventh, and then Jake Bauers stepped in against Snell. What followed was one of the great at-bats of this postseason.
Bauers fouled off five pitches, including a hanging slider he pulled just foul down the right-field line that he nearly launched out of the park. Snell had gotten away with that one. On the 11th pitch of the at-bat, Snell came back with a 97.8 mph fastball in the exact same location. Bauers did not miss it twice.
He drove it 412 feet to right field, a no-doubt go-ahead two-run homer. Two pitches later, Garrett Mitchell went back-to-back with a 428-foot solo shot of his own, the third set of back-to-back home runs in Brewers postseason history. Snell’s night was over. The Dodgers’ night was over too.
This was the second consecutive NLCS game where Bauers has been the difference. In Game 2 on Monday, he worked a 12-pitch walk against Yamamoto to load the bases with two outs, and Christian Yelich followed with the go-ahead RBI single. Whatever Milwaukee is paying Bauers, it is not enough.
Ohtani, dropped to sixth, could not save them
Manager Dave Roberts made a bold call before the game, sliding Shohei Ohtani down to sixth in the batting order in the middle of a brutal postseason slump. The results were modestly better: 1-for-2 with a walk and a hit-by-pitch. But the Dodgers managed just five hits as a team, one more than the three they scraped together in Game 2.
Kyle Tucker, who joined the Dodgers this past offseason on a four-year, $240 million deal, tried to keep the faith after the loss. “This team has won four games before, so that is what we are going to have to do,” he said. “I believe in this group, the staff, the clubhouse and guys in here. I think if there is a team to do it, it is this team, but it is not going to come easy, obviously.”
He is right about the math being daunting. The 2004 Boston Red Sox are the only team in MLB history to rally from 3-0 in a best-of-seven. The Dodgers have trailed 3-0 just once before in a seven-game series: the 1966 World Series, when Baltimore swept them.
History is stacking up against LA
The storylines piling up around this series are remarkable. Milwaukee is now 6-1 this postseason and one victory away from its first National League pennant. The franchise’s only World Series trip came in 1982, when it was still an American League team, and it lost in seven games to the St. Louis Cardinals.
This is also the eighth time two teams have met in the postseason after one swept the other the year before. The Dodgers swept Milwaukee in four games in last year’s NLCS. Per MLB’s Sarah Langs and the Elias Sports Bureau, only one team has ever turned that script around: the 1923 Yankees, swept by the Giants in 1922 and champions in six games in 1923. A win on Thursday would make the Brewers the second.
Milwaukee’s Game 3 rally was also its fifth comeback win of the playoffs, tying the most any team has ever managed in its first seven games of a postseason. The other two teams on that list: the 1996 Yankees and the 1980 Phillies. Both of them won the World Series.
And here is the sweetest detail for Brewers fans: a team that finished dead last in the National League in home runs during the regular season, with just 154, has been blasting its way through October anyway. Somebody tell the Fox pregame panel, where Alex Rodriguez, David Ortiz and Derek Jeter all picked the Dodgers to win Game 3, that the Brewers won 103 games.
One win away from the Fall Classic
Game 4 is Thursday night at Dodger Stadium, and Milwaukee is going for the sweep. If the Brewers finish this off, they will flip last year’s NLCS humiliation into the franchise’s first NL pennant and head to the World Series as the team nobody believed in.
The Dodgers, meanwhile, are facing a question they have not faced in years: what does the end of a dynasty look like? It looks like 3-0. It looks like an 11-pitch at-bat from a 31-year-old first baseman that broke the game open. It looks like a team one win from the World Series that refuses to lose in October.
For more, see our coverage of NLCS Game 1 and the Dodgers falling into an 0-2 hole. The full series timeline lives in our US Sports archive. Sources: Reuters and USA Today.
