If you went to bed Saturday night thinking the Dodgers were about to sleepwalk to a three-peat, Milwaukee had other plans. The Brewers walked into the National League Championship Series on Sunday, punched the two-time defending champions in the mouth, and walked out with a 2-1 Game 1 win that nobody outside Wisconsin saw coming.
This was not a fluke. It was a statement. And the loudest voice in the room belonged to a 27-year-old second baseman who did something only two other players have ever done in the Statcast era.
The swing that silenced the Dodgers
Through three innings, Tarik Skubal looked like exactly what the Dodgers paid for. The two-time Cy Young winner, the prize of the trade deadline, the guy Los Angeles grabbed from Detroit over the protestations of half the league including Milwaukee itself. Six strikeouts through three frames. One lone hit. A 1-0 Dodgers lead that felt like it was about to become 4-0.
Then came the fourth inning, and Brice Turang, and a swing that will live on October highlight reels.
Down 2-0 in the count, Skubal went to his 96 mph sinker on the inner half. Turang turned on it and sent the ball screaming 384 feet to left-center field. Opposite field. Off a lefty. On a sinker above 95 mph. Per Statcast tracking, that had happened exactly twice before in the Statcast era, and never on a pitch that hard.
Just like that, 1-1. And you could feel the entire series tilt.
Turang had been a ghost in the Division Series against San Diego. Two hits in 16 at-bats. The red-hot finish to his regular season felt like a distant memory. So much for that. One swing flipped his entire postseason narrative, and it flipped this game on its head.
“It was just the third time in the Statcast era that a lefty-lefty sinker on the inside corner went for an opposite-field home run,” is the kind of sentence that sounds boring until you realize you just witnessed history by accident.
The kid who delivered the dagger
If Turang provided the fireworks, 21-year-old Luis Lara provided the knife.
The fifth inning could not have been more Brewers. No tape-measure homer. No thunder. Just execution. Garrett Mitchell worked a leadoff walk. Cooper Pratt laid down a sacrifice bunt that moved him over. And Lara, barely old enough to buy a celebratory beer in the clubhouse, slapped a line drive off the pitcher’s mound and into the outfield for an RBI single.
2-1. And for a team that finished last in the National League in home runs this season, that run was worth about ten.
Milwaukee manager Pat Murphy has spent all season building a club that wins this way. Pitching, defense, small ball, a bullpen that slams doors. On Sunday night, every piece showed up.
The Skubal vs. Miz showdown that fizzled for LA
Let us be honest about what Sunday was supposed to be. This was billed as the pitching duel of the postseason. Tarik Skubal against Jacob Misiorowski, the two arms everybody wanted at the deadline, squaring off in Game 1 of the NLCS. Baseball does not get better matchups than this.
It did not exactly go as scripted. Neither ace made it past the fifth inning.
Skubal finished with five innings, five hits, two earned runs, seven strikeouts and two walks on 81 pitches. Not terrible. Not the shutdown ace performance the Dodgers needed, either. Milwaukee’s approach was the story. They did not try to overpower him. They wore him down, worked counts, and when he made one mistake, Turang made him pay for it.
Misiorowski was wilder but grittier. The 22-year-old flamethrower needed 94 pitches just to get through 4 1/3 innings. He escaped a bases-loaded jam in the second inning that could have buried Milwaukee before the game even started. Ohtani walked. Teoscar Hernandez singled. Andy Pages delivered an RBI single. Kyle Tucker walked to load them up. And then Enrique Hernandez bounced into an inning-ending double play, and Misiorowski roared off the mound like a guy who knew he had just survived the Dodgers’ best punch.
Dave Roberts tipped his cap afterward, telling reporters the Dodgers did a great job getting Misiorowski out when they did. He was right. They just could not do anything with the bullpen that followed.
The bullpen door slammed shut
This is where the Brewers are genuinely terrifying. Milwaukee’s bullpen did not allow a run. Not one.
Abner Uribe struck out Andy Pages with runners on the corners and two outs in the sixth. Aaron Ashby followed with two scoreless frames. Trevor Megill closed it out, though not without drama. Two two-out walks in the ninth put the tying and winning runs on base. Then Mookie Betts flied out to center, and the celebration was on.
The Brewers’ bullpen was elite all season. It was elite in the NLDS against San Diego. And now it is 1-0 in the NLCS against the most stacked lineup in baseball.
The Dodgers’ October nightmare, again
Here is the number that should terrify Los Angeles: nine runners left on base on Sunday night. Nine. And per tracking by Dodgers reporters, every player on the roster not named Andy Pages is now 0-for-18 this postseason with runners in scoring position.
Pages, the same guy who delivered the bases-loaded single that saved them in the NLDS Game 4 against Atlanta, drove in their only run again on Sunday. The rest of the lineup? Silence. Shohei Ohtani walked to open the second and never mattered again. The heart of the order went quiet at the exact wrong time.
President of baseball operations Andrew Friedman did not hide his frustration. Asked after the game whether the team’s one-hit-with-runners-in-scoring-position act was part of some master plan, Friedman deadpanned: “No, it was not part of the plan, but the one hit was big. I think it speaks to the vast number of ways we can win a baseball game. But certainly, for quality of life, I would like us to cash in a few more of those opportunities in the next round.”
Translation: this has to stop, and it has to stop now.
What Game 2 means
The Dodgers are not panicking, and honestly, they should not be. They turn to Yoshinobu Yamamoto in Game 2, a generational ace who can shut down anybody. But here is the catch that makes Milwaukee dangerous: the Brewers just beat Tarik Skubal. The boogeyman is gone. The “unbeatable” narrative is gone.
And the Brewers are not the same team Los Angeles swept in last year’s NLCS. This Milwaukee club won more regular-season games than anybody. It has the best bullpen in the National League. It has a 21-year-old who just drove in the biggest run of his life like it was a Tuesday. And now it has home-field confidence plus a series lead over the team that embarrassed it a year ago.
One game does not win a series. But Game 1s set the terms. And the terms are these: the Dodgers can out-hit anybody in October except right now they cannot hit anybody. The Brewers can win any way you let them, and right now, they are letting nothing through.
The ALCS gets going tonight as well, with the Rays hosting a Guardians team that just completed its own epic ALDS comeback. October baseball is at its absolute best this week. Do not blink.
Milwaukee 1, Los Angeles 0. October just got very, very interesting.
