LOS ANGELES – Maybe you did a double-take when you saw Brewers first baseman Andrew Vaughn playing third base on Thursday and catcher Gary Sánchez at first. Maybe you’re not sure that hitting near the bottom of the lineup will be the thing to spur slumping stars Christian Yelich and William Contreras. Maybe you’ve wondered what happened to all of the hits with runners in scoring position. Maybe you worry that a team so discombobulated at this late stage of a regular season can’t possibly beat a behemoth like the Dodgers in the postseason.
If so, then this was the game for you.
Trailing by two runs and down to their final two outs at Dodger Stadium, the Brewers won with the sort of rally that carried them into this week with the best record in baseball. They collected five singles in a six-batter span of the ninth inning against Dodgers relievers Edwin Díaz and Alex Vesia, flipping a two-run deficit into a lead on Jake Bauers’ go-ahead base hit on the way to a 5-4 win.
How does David beat Goliath in October?
“That’s Brewers baseball right there,” said Garrett Mitchell, who supplied the single that tied it.
Talk about good timing. A Dodgers win would have pulled them even with the Brewers atop the National League’s overall standings, with the Braves just half a game back. That matters just as much as the battle between the Brewers and Cubs for the NL Central crown, since the top two records in each league come with a bye through the aptly named, best-of-three Wild Card Series round.
But by rallying to secure a win when closer Trevor Megill closed out the bottom of the ninth for his 22nd save, the Brewers remained atop the NL at 75-47. They also improved to 4-38 when trailing after eight innings.
Considering all the context, was it Milwaukee’s biggest victory of the year?
“It’s got to be up there because of what we faced in the last three days,” said manager Pat Murphy, whose club just got swept in a three-game series in San Diego while going 3-for-28 with 12 strikeouts with runners in scoring position.
“I think so, at least for this season,” said Megill. “That was huge to get the boys on track.”
“Definitely up there,” Mitchell said.
The lone dissent came from Bauers, of all people. The man who supplied the winning hit.
“I think to treat this game as bigger than another one is not wise,” he said.
That outlook tracked, given what Bauers said Wednesday in the wake of a crushing, 11-inning loss to the Padres. When he was asked about solutions for the Brewers’ clutch hitting woes, he said, “I just think we need to chill the [bleep] out a little bit.”
“It’s helped me all season,” Bauers said a day later, in a different clubhouse. “When I said we needed to chill out, that’s more along the lines of what it looks like. Line drives, putting good swings on balls, putting it in play with the right ball flight and then ultimately getting the results.”
Said Mitchell: “Obviously, we haven’t done a great job with runners in scoring position as of late. We know that. Everyone knows that. I think to be down a couple runs there and have the bottom of the lineup turn it back over to the top, and kind of pass it from one guy to the next, it felt really good. That took a lot off of us, I thought.”
They didn’t exactly bash their way to victory. Through eight innings, the Brewers’ only runs scored with two outs in the fourth, when Nos. 8-9 hitters Joey Ortiz and David Hamilton took back-to-back walks with the bases loaded against Dodgers starter Roki Sasaki. He threw only 54 of 101 pitches for strikes and walked five batters in six wobbly innings, but yielded only four hits.
That kept the Dodgers in position to take a 4-2 lead on Max Muncy’s three-run home run off Brewers reliever Antonio Senzatela in the sixth, a booming shot that made Muncy the all-time Dodger Stadium leader with 131 home runs.
It was still 4-2 with one out in the ninth when the Brewers mounted their comeback with four straight singles from Ortiz, Hamilton, Jackson Chourio and Mitchell for a 4-4 tie. After Díaz struck out Sánchez, the Dodgers called for left-hander Vesia, and Bauers, 0-for-3 to start the night and down in the count, 0-2, to begin the at-bat after swinging at two fastballs above the zone, hit a 1-2 slider through the right side of the infield for yet another single and the lead.
“It’s about not riding the waves,” Bauers said. “If you don’t ride the waves, then you’ll get back to who you are quicker than if you’re riding these ups and riding these downs. You’re going to have downs. Individually, you’re going to have downs throughout the season. And collectively, it’s important you’re not riding those waves.
“You stick to your approach, you stick to the things that you said you were going to do in Spring Training. You keep showing up. And you just keep going. You keep going until the end, and they send you home or you’re the last team standing.”
