Milwaukee leads the National League Championship Series 3-0. One more win sends the Brewers to their first World Series since 1982.
The Dodgers get Tyler Glasnow on Thursday night at Dodger Stadium, 8 p.m. ET on FS1, and he is the only reason this is still a sentence worth writing.
Glasnow Has Been the One Thing That Works
Glasnow owns a 1.73 postseason ERA, five earned runs in 26 innings across four starts and three relief appearances. The Dodgers are 7-0 in postseason games he has pitched.
That is a genuine trump card in an elimination game, and it is also the problem. Los Angeles needs four of them and has one.
Milwaukee has not named a starter. Pat Murphy would say only that there will be pitching, which is the most Pat Murphy thing available. The expectation is a bullpen game out of Kyle Harrison, Shane Drohan, Chad Patrick or Dustin May. Milwaukee’s staff has a 1.74 postseason ERA, so the Brewers can afford to be coy.
How Los Angeles Got Here
The series has not been close in the ways that matter. Milwaukee won Game 1 by 2-1 and Game 2 by 7-4, both at American Family Field, then took Game 3 at Dodger Stadium 6-2.
The offense is the reason. Shohei Ohtani was 3-for-20 and Will Smith 1-for-23 this postseason entering Game 3. Los Angeles dropped Ohtani to sixth in the order for Game 3 and he is slotted sixth as the designated hitter again for Game 4, with Glasnow starting.
Smith’s two-run double off Abner Uribe in the sixth inning of Game 3 produced both of the Dodgers’ runs. Uribe walked three men in that inning. Los Angeles needed a Brewers reliever to lose the plate to score at all.
The Part Dodgers Fans Will Not Want to Hear
This is not a slump the Dodgers are going to hit their way out of in one night. Milwaukee won 103 games, has the better bullpen in this series by a wide margin, and has taken three games while its opponent’s two best hitters have gone a combined 4-for-43.
The 3-0 comeback has happened once in baseball history. Betting on the second one requires believing that an offense which has scored nine runs in three games is about to score in four straight.
Glasnow can win Thursday. He cannot win Friday, Sunday and Monday.
Milwaukee Earned the Short Series
The Brewers held home-field advantage in this series on the strength of 103 wins, and they have used it exactly the way a pitching-first team should. They have scored 15 runs in three games without needing a single blowout, and they have handed the ball to a different arm in every situation that mattered.
A franchise whose last pennant came in 1982 is one night from ending that. The pressure of closing it out on the road, in a building where the Dodgers have won two titles this decade, is the only thing left for Milwaukee to handle badly.
Murphy’s team has not handled anything badly yet. Expect that to hold.
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.