Milwaukee has its Game 3 starter. Manager Pat Murphy named left-hander Robert Gasser on Monday, and the 27-year-old gets the ball Wednesday at Dodger Stadium on six days of rest.
Gasser made his first career playoff start in the division series. He was chosen over Kyle Harrison, Brandon Sproat, Coleman Crow, Shane Drohan and Chad Patrick, which gives you a sense of how many directions Milwaukee could have gone.
Six Days of Rest Is the Point
Milwaukee has leaned on its bullpen harder than anybody left in October. Four relievers covered 4 2/3 shutout innings in Game 1 alone. A rested starter who can give the team five innings in Los Angeles is worth more to the Brewers right now than a marginally better arm on short rest.
That is the calculation here. Gasser is not the best pitcher on this staff. He is the one whose arm is freshest in the game where Milwaukee can least afford a bullpen game.
Game 4 Is Where It Gets Interesting
Milwaukee’s reported options for Game 4 are a bullpen game or an opener, with Chad Patrick and Shane Drohan named as possibilities for that role.
Either way, the Brewers are planning to get through a championship series without a conventional four-man rotation. They did the same thing to San Diego in the division series and it worked, partly because their relievers have been excellent and partly because every game has stayed close enough for a bullpen to decide it.
Milwaukee opened this postseason with five straight games decided by two runs or fewer, which is the fourth time any team has done that. A rotation built this way only survives in close games. So far every game has been one.
Los Angeles Has Not Named Anybody
The Dodgers’ Game 3 starter was still unannounced as of Monday. MLB.com’s Sonja Chen reported Blake Snell as the likely choice, which would be the 33-year-old’s 17th career postseason start.
Snell’s last outing was Oct. 4 against Atlanta: 3 2/3 innings, one earned run, five walks, pulled at 90 pitches in a 3-2 loss. He would come into Game 3 with nine full days of rest.
Five walks in under four innings is the problem. Against a Milwaukee lineup that walked, bunted and singled its way to the winning run in Game 1, free bases are the one thing Los Angeles cannot hand out.
The Series Context
Milwaukee leads 1-0 after beating Tarik Skubal 2-1 on Sunday. Game 2 is Monday evening at American Family Field, with rookie Logan Henderson against Yoshinobu Yamamoto. The series then moves to Los Angeles for Games 3, 4 and 5.
Milwaukee holds home-field advantage, so Games 6 and 7 would return to Wisconsin. Getting to Wednesday with a lead and a rested left-hander on the mound is roughly the best version of this week the Brewers could have drawn up.
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.