The Milwaukee Brewers beat the Los Angeles Dodgers 7-4 on Monday night at American Family Field to take a 2-0 lead in the National League Championship Series. The score undersells it badly.
All four Dodgers runs scored without a hit. Milwaukee’s bullpen retired every batter it faced. Los Angeles finished with three hits.
The Bullpen Did Something That Has Never Been Done
Dustin May, JoJo Romero, Abner Uribe and Aaron Ashby combined to retire all 15 hitters they faced. Five perfect innings. MLB.com and CBS Sports both reported it as the first time a bullpen has thrown that many all-perfect innings in a single postseason game.
Ashby finished it with a five-out save. The Dodgers did not put a runner on base after Logan Henderson left in the fifth, and 15 straight Los Angeles hitters were retired to end the game.
Milwaukee’s relievers have now allowed one earned run in roughly 29 postseason innings. The Brewers are 4-0 at home this October.
Yamamoto Had His Worst Night in October
Yoshinobu Yamamoto recorded eight outs. He went 2.2 innings, allowed four hits and three runs, walked two, struck out one and threw 75 pitches, 36 of them in the third inning alone.
It was the shortest postseason start of his career and it ended a run of five straight playoff starts allowing one run or fewer. His career postseason marks entering the night were a 2.24 ERA, a 0.83 WHIP and a .175 opponents average, all near the top of the all-time leaderboards for starters with at least 10 appearances.
Jake Bauers drew a 12-pitch walk in the third that ran the count up and set the inning in motion. Christian Yelich followed with a two-out, two-run single that gave Milwaukee a 3-2 lead and ended Yamamoto’s night.
Contreras Was the Difference
Los Angeles retook the lead 4-3 in the fifth on a pair of sacrifice flies and two Henderson throwing errors. William Contreras answered immediately with a 436-foot solo home run to center off Kris Bubic to tie it, then singled in the go-ahead run in the sixth after Brice Turang was intentionally walked.
Contreras went 3-for-4 with a walk and three RBI. Yelich was 2-for-5 with two RBI. Turang went 2-for-3 with a walk and an RBI, and David Hamilton scored three times.
Henderson’s own line was a mess, four runs on three hits in four innings with two throwing errors, only two of the runs earned. Milwaukee won anyway because the Dodgers could not hit.
The Dodgers Are Not Hitting at All
Shohei Ohtani went 0-for-4 with two strikeouts. Mookie Betts was 1-for-3. Freddie Freeman and Teoscar Hernandez each drove in a run on a sacrifice fly and neither got a hit. Los Angeles has not homered in the series.
Dave Roberts was blunt afterward. “We threw out three hits tonight,” he said, adding that the Brewers “are just finding ways to win pitches better than we are.” Betts said the team has “got to find a way to get those hits.”
Teoscar Hernandez offered the only defiance: “Just because we lose two games doesn’t mean it’s over.”
Historically, It Kind Of Is
Teams leading 2-0 in a best-of-seven postseason series have won 79 of 95 times, about 83 percent. Game 3 is Wednesday at Dodger Stadium, with Robert Gasser going for Milwaukee and Blake Snell lined up for Los Angeles.
A Brewers pennant would put the World Series in Milwaukee for the first time in 44 years. Based on two games, nothing about that feels unlikely.
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.