After a flyout and strikeout on his first two attempts, Jake Bauers’ third time against Blake Snell in Wednesday’s Game 3 of the National League Championship Series went like this: Bauers took a slider to the middle of the plate for the first strike. He made two non-competitive throws to make it 2-1. He fouled out on a changeup, then, sitting on two strikes, four pitches at bat, he decided he just wouldn’t strike out again.
Bauers therefore committed a foul on a slider in the zone, then on a curveball. He fired an inside fastball to make the count complete. Then he managed to foul a high fastball and, immediately afterward, he slowed down to catch a changeup in the zone. As the pitch count for that at-bat topped double digits, Bauers pulled a little too hard on a slider that sat in the zone, sending it into the stands past the right field foul pole. On the 11th throw, Bauers makes no mistake. Snell threw a fastball up the middle at 98 mph, and Bauers smoked a no-doubt two-run homer that traveled more than 400 feet into right field to give the Milwaukee Brewers a 3-2 lead.
When Bauers’ teammate Garrett Mitchell hit his own home run off Snell just two pitches later, it was, comparatively, a disappointment. Spiritually speaking, a guy hitting a home run after missing another home run counts as two home runs. Bauers had already won the game; Mitchell’s own home run was just excessive off Snell.
Back to the half-inning before the Bauers homer, and things looked very different. Brewers pitcher Robert Gasser lived up to his last name and fought well against Snell for five full innings, but when Abner Uribe replaced Gasser in the bottom of the sixth, his lack of command was evident. He walked batters three and four in the Los Angeles Dodgers lineup, retired batter five and ran into batter six: an injured Shohei Ohtani. Ohtani, who had only three hits and three walks in 26 plate appearances up to that point in the Series, walked to load the bases. Then Uribe ran into the seventh batter in the lineup: Dodgers catcher Will Smith, who was having an even worse postseason than Ohtani. Smith hit a long, crisp double on a first-pitch sinker up the middle, driving in two runs and giving the Dodgers a 2-1 lead.
Even though Brewers manager Pat Murphy ultimately retired Uribe for DL Hall, and despite the fact that the man named Dayton Lane retired the next two batters to kill the rally, it seemed very briefly like a turning point. Snell had struck out nine Milwaukee batters in six innings. Until Uribe’s release, the Brewers bullpen had not allowed a single run. Those were the first cracks, exacerbated by Murphy’s slow response to Uribe’s obvious lack of his usual business that day. If the slumping Dodgers big guns could get going, a 2-1 series deficit might be eminently surmountable; even without the offense, just think about Tyler Glasnow on the mound next, and the opportunity to bring back Tarik Skubal, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto – unlikely to have two bad starts in a row – again. And then a half inning later, Jake Bauers came in and took the breath away from the Dodgers, just like the Brewers did to their playoff opponents, game after game after game.
The Brewers added two more runs before the game ended, but with their bullpen returning to its “untouchable” status in the postseason, all they needed was the Bauers home run. Bauers had already led an at-bat like that in the previous game, against another star Dodgers starter in Yamamoto. The Brewers recently took what was supposedly unsustainable and converted it into a roughly 100-win regular season, and this year they managed to continue that process with them through the postseason. This makes Bauers a good summary of their entire deal. Why not rely on a guy who stuck with baseball for health insurance, stringing together two of the best at-bats in the postseason, in back-to-back games, against back-to-back great pitchers?
It doesn’t matter how good or threatening the Dodgers’ rotation looks on paper. Skubal, Yamamoto, Snell: the Brewers beat them all, paying homage to the same relentless inevitability with which the Dodgers demolished them last year. A team can pay for all these guys, and fans can marvel at the absurdity that results (Will Smith batting seventh? Shohei Ohtani batting sixth?), but it’s playoff baseball, and it’s the Jake Bauers who lead 3-0 in the series.
On Thursday night, the Dodgers will be fighting for their playoff lives. And the Milwaukee Brewers, well, they just have to keep walking.
Gn sports
