Milwaukee lost 4-3 at Petco Park on Tuesday night, and in doing so matched one of the strangest records in baseball. That was the Brewers’ 12th consecutive postseason road loss, tying a mark held by the Senators and Twins franchise across a span running from 1925 to 1987.
Milwaukee won 103 games this season, the most in Major League Baseball. It still leads this National League Division Series 2-1. And it has not won a playoff game away from home since Game 3 of the 2018 NLCS at Dodger Stadium.
The Brewers are 6-24 all time in postseason road games. Not a slump. A franchise condition.
Pat Murphy wants no part of the history lesson
Murphy pushed back when the streak came up. “I wouldn’t beat up the old Brewers if you don’t mind,” he said. He also noted, accurately, that most teams that have beaten Milwaukee on the road went on to the World Series, and three of them won it.
Christian Yelich made the sharper point. “I mean, this team has one person playing from 2018,” he said. He is that person. A 12-game streak that stretches back eight years is a statistic about a uniform, not a roster.
Aaron Ashby framed the mindset differently. “It’s like we’ve got 40 guys versus 50,000,” he said.
How Tuesday actually got away
Jake Cronenworth put San Diego ahead in the fifth, swinging at the first pitch he saw from JoJo Romero, an 80 mph sweeper, and driving it into the right-field seats. Cronenworth came in 1-for-13 this postseason and had homered off a left-hander once in 93 regular-season plate appearances in 2026. Romero had given up five home runs to left-handed hitters all year.
The fourth run came in the sixth on a play Milwaukee will think about. Xander Bogaerts singled off DL Hall, moved up on a wild pitch, and scored when rookie shortstop Cooper Pratt’s throw to first got away on Miguel Andujar’s broken-bat grounder.
Pratt did not hide from it. “You can make excuses about everything, but I fielded the ball and I threw the ball in the dirt,” he said. “I cost us a run.”
Milwaukee hit the ball hard enough to win
William Contreras reached base four times with two hits, including his second home run of the series, and scored twice. Yelich had three hits, one of which ended a 19-game postseason streak without an RBI dating to 2018. Brice Turang singled in the seventh after opening the series 0-for-10.
The game ended on Yelich’s 107.1 mph line drive to Bogaerts, who short-hopped it and started a double play. The expected batting average on that ball was .630.
Turang’s summary was the honest one. “We hit the ball hard,” he said. Jackson Chourio, 0-for-4 with a 242-foot sacrifice fly, allowed that he was “maybe a little bit anxious on some of those” and that Wednesday “is a new day.”
The series is still Milwaukee’s to lose
Every game in this series has been decided by one run. The Brewers have the lead and two cracks at closing it out, and they do not need to break the road streak to win the series if they take Game 4.
Milwaukee had not named a Game 4 starter as of Tuesday night. Robert Gasser, Shane Drohan, Chad Patrick and Kyle Harrison were all options, and Murphy has floated using Jacob Misiorowski for an inning. Trevor Megill and Ashby are rested.
Walker Buehler goes for San Diego. The Brewers get one more chance to make the road thing irrelevant.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.