Breaking Down Jake Bauers’ 11-Pitch Masterclass

Whether or not you tuned in for Game 3 of the NLCS between the Brewers and the Dodgers, you surely know by now that the highlight of the game belonged to Jake Bauers. After working a back-breaking 12-pitch walk that hastened Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s early departure from Game 2, Bauers put the Brewers ahead with a homer in the seventh inning on the 11th pitch he saw from Blake Snell. Ben Clemens wrote about it in his game story. Michael Baumann wrote about it in his article about the perils of leaving a starter (particularly this starter) in too long. Over at Brewer Fanatic, Matthew Trueblood wrote about both it and the also-impressive walk that Andrew Vaughn worked immediately beforehand. This is the kind of of moment that deserves to be enjoyed from as many angles as possible. As such, what follows is a pitch-by-pitch breakdown of the at-bat, diving into the intention and execution behind each pitch.
Pitch 1: Slider, Called Strike, 0-1

That may look like a get-me-over slider, and that Snell assumed Bauers would be taking on the first pitch because he’d just walked the previous batter, but it’s not. In his first plate appearance, Snell had started Bauers with a four-seamer and Bauers had fouled it off. In his second, he’d thrown a first-pitch slider just below the zone, and Bauers had whiffed. He’d swung at the first pitch in both his previous times up, and as you can see, he wasn’t up there looking to take. He fired his hips and had to check his swing. In fact, although Bauers had one of the lower swing rates in the league this season, his 33% swing rate on the first pitch was actually slightly above the league average.
Look at Will Smith’s glove as Snell delivers the ball. He’s got it all the way down on the ground. The plan was to repeat the first pitch from the second plate appearance, getting Bauers to chase another low slider for a whiff or maybe even hit a double-play ball. Instead, Snell missed — badly. The ball ended up right over the heart of the plate. This is a meatball, and Bauers failed to make Snell pay for it because he was focused on getting a fastball. “I was looking for a fastball, and I didn’t want to miss it,” he said after the game. “I said I’ll adjust to anything else, but get a heater, don’t miss it.” That’s certainly a reasonable approach, seeing as Snell throws his fastball half the time, and he’d already started Bauers with one earlier in the game. But it cost Bauers a chance at unloading on a good pitch and put him behind in the count.
Pitch 2: Changeup, Ball, 1-1

You can understand why Snell threw a changeup here. Bauers had tipped his hand with that check swing. He was way in front of that slider because he was looking fastball. You don’t want to give him a fastball, and you don’t want to give him two sliders in a row (especially because the last one ended up in murder-me territory). You want to throw something that starts out looking like a fastball, which eliminates the curveball. The changeup is all that’s left, but let’s be clear about how unusual that is. Snell throws his changeup to lefties just 3% of the time, and never in this situation. Over the past 10 seasons, he’d thrown just one 0-1 changeup to a lefty in the regular season. One. In 10 years. But he had also thrown one just 10 days earlier, to Drake Baldwin in Game 2 of the NLDS. The pressure of the playoffs can change even the most deeply ingrained tendencies.
Once again, Snell missed badly. The pitch was supposed to start out a strike and then drop below the zone, but it started too low and ended up bouncing. It never looked like a strike, and Bauers isn’t the kind of guy to chase on 0-1. This year, 206 batters saw at least 200 0-1 pitches. Among them, Bauers’ 35% swing rate ranked 200th.
Pitch 3: Fastball, Ball, 2-1

If we were talking about any other pitcher, you’d say this was supposed to be a get-me-over fastball, an attempt to get back on track after failing to execute two pitches in a row. But Blake Snell is not the kind of pitcher who lives up and chucks a pitch down the middle. Smith’s target was at the top of the zone. Snell had been racking up chases up above the zone for either whiffs or fouls all night, and he wanted another one. It sure looks like Snell yanked this one to his glove side because he was trying to put some mustard on it to make sure he blew it by Bauers. Instead, it was another bad miss and another easy take. This was a remarkable at-bat from Bauers, and it started out with him in an 0-1 hole against one of the best pitchers in the game, but it also started with Snell missing badly on the first three pitches.
Pitch 4: Changeup, Foul, 2-2

Now this is a gutsy pitch. You just walked someone. You’re behind 2-1 because you failed to execute your last three pitches. Why not aim another left-on-left changeup right at the very center of home plate, and just hope that it finishes with enough arm-side run to make it to the edge? If it doesn’t break as much as usual, or if you miss to your glove side, then it’ll just kind of sit there out over the plate begging to be pounded.
Incidentally, we should probably mention Statcast’s run values per 100 pitches. Did you know that when he saw left-on-left offspeed pitches this season, Bauers’ run value was 1.5, and the only lefties with a higher mark (minimum 25 pitches) were Jac Caglianone, Juan Soto, Yordan Alvarez, Shohei Ohtani, Gunnar Henderson, Pete Crow-Armstrong, and James Wood? Sort of sounds like a list of the very best left-handed hitters on the planet, right?
Luckily for Snell, this pitch was perfect. It clipped the very edge of the zone, and Bauers, still looking fastball, was way out ahead of it. He just managed to hold back long enough to nick it. Smith extended the catcher’s mitt toward his pitcher to congratulate him on a perfect pitch. That made it 2-2, and under normal circumstances, that would be a big deal. The league as a whole had a wRC+ of 70 from 2-2 onward this season. Had Snell missed the zone yet again, he’d be 3-1, when the league wRC+ was 214.
Bauers himself ran a wRC+ of 87 after reaching a 2-2 count. Oddly, though, he was up at 127 after getting to 2-2 against lefties, because he walked 24% of the time, the second-highest rate in baseball. Considering Snell’s above-average walk rate and Bauers’ unusual ability to draw a walk in this exact situation, a walk seemed very likely.
Pitch 5: Slider, Foul, 2-2 (again)

This was the slider Snell meant to throw on the first pitch. It was maybe an inch or two higher than he would’ve liked – if he got it down a little bit more, maybe Bauers would’ve missed it entirely rather than fouling it off – but Bauers was again way out in front and on top of it. Look at the way the ball comes off the bat, straight down and hooked so hard that bounces in the left-handed hitter’s batter’s box. That’s not something you see every day. Snell had thrown three pitches in the strike zone, and Bauers was way out in front on all three of them.
Pitch 6: Curveball, Foul, 2-2 (again again)

Oh right, Snell has a curveball. It was his second-best pitch this season, but this was just the second one he’d thrown Bauers all game, because Bauers was one of the best left-on-left curveball hitters in baseball this season. He ran a .458 wOBA against them and had just an 11% whiff rate. Most of the time, he took them for balls. But what else was Snell going to do? The curve is his best non-fastball pitch. He couldn’t seem to get a whiff on the slider, and he’d already risked two changeups to a guy who crushes them. The curveball was the only thing left that could surprise Bauers, and surprise him it did. He took a late, defensive hack, and met the pitch just 20 inches in front of his center of mass. He threw his mechanics out of whack in order to do so, and ended up with another odd foul, chopping it straight down only to bounce back up into his torso as he nearly fell backwards out of the box.
Here, we should stop and note something. This was Bauers’ third foul of the at-bat, and he would go on to foul off three more. In one sense, it shouldn’t be surprising that he has worked some impressive long at-bats in this series. He averaged just under 4.2 pitchers per plate appearances in 2026. Of the 205 players with at least 400 plate appearances, that ranked 24th, putting him in the 88th percentile. However, he didn’t get all the way up there because he’s a wizard at extending plate appearances. To do that, you need to be great at fouling off two-strike pitches and Bauers is actually well below average in that respect. He fouled off 20% of the two-strike pitches he swung at this year, which put him in just the 13th percentile. His plate appearances are long simply because he’s very passive. His 41% swing rate landed in just the sixth percentile. That’s all it takes, people. If you want to be one of the best hitters in baseball at working a count, just don’t swing much. Sometimes it’s a very simple game.
Pitch 7: Fastball, Ball, 3-2

Snell had been busting Bauers inside with fastballs all night. Five of the eight pitches he saw in his first two plate appearances were four-seamers, and he’d flied out and struck out. Bauers was ahead on soft stuff, but not so far ahead that he was whiffing entirely. Perhaps that meant that he was somewhere in between, and after seeing soft stuff for three straight pitches and five of the last six, it would be possible to blow one by him.
But Snell again missed his spot, this time to the arm side. Smith’s target was up again, but Snell was off the plate inside. It wasn’t a comfortable take for Bauers, who was finally seeing the pitch he’d been looking for, but it wasn’t easy either.
Pitch 8: Fastball, Foul, 3-2

There it is. That’s the elevated fastball Snell had been trying to throw. Nice and tempting, impossible to lay off. And at 98.2 mph, it was harder than the first two and with more induced rise than Snell’s average four-seamer. But Bauers wasn’t in between after all. With pinch-runner Christian Yelich breaking for second in the background, he still managed to get a piece of it. It was very high, and very definitely ball four. That’s a pitch designed to rack up whiffs. It was located 3.82 feet off the ground. This year, pitches that came in between 98 and 99 mph and between 3.8 and 4.0 feet had a 53% whiff rate. Maybe if he hadn’t just seen a fastball, Bauers would have been just that little bit farther behind, and Snell would’ve gotten the strikeout.
Perhaps we should acknowledge, though, just how good Bauers was against left-on-left four-seamers this season. He put up a .521 wOBA against them, second only to Ben Rice. His four home runs against them were tied for second. Snell was truly going strength against strength here.
Pitch 9: Changeup, Foul, 3-2 (again)

After throwing two fastballs in a row, and with Bauers clearly hunting velocity, Snell surely thought he’d set Bauers up so that he’d be out ahead of something soft. This changeup was much closer to where he wanted it, just an inch or so from the bottom of the zone. This time, though, Bauers didn’t look like he had to hold himself back for dear life. He was still very much ahead of the pitch, but by significantly less. You can tell because of the fact that he took a full, healthy hack, and Statcast backs it up; he made contact four inches deeper than he had on the first changeup.
Snell is no stranger to deep counts, but this is where things got scary. Bauers had been ahead of all the soft stuff he’d thrown at him. He took a defensive hack at that 2-2 curveball to stay alive. But then he got a piece of that absurdly high fastball, and on the very next pitch, a changeup down (though not quite as down as Snell would’ve liked it), he looked more comfortable. Look at the way he finishes his swing with a hop. This is what people mean when they say someone looks hitterish. That’s concerning.
Pitch 10: Slider, Foul, 3-2 (again again)
And we’re now escalating from concern to alarm. For Snell, it probably seemed like there was no right pitch to throw at this point. Even when he chased a fastball at his eyes, Bauers (like Vaughn before him) got a piece and stayed alive. He looked all too comfortable against the changeup, and how many left-on-left changeups can you really throw in one plate appearance? Until the playoffs, Snell had only once thrown more than one left-on-left changeup in a single game. The curveball might have made sense, but it also offered the least difference from the previous pitch in terms of velocity and movement profile. Snell had only followed a changeup with a curveball once all game, and it was to Vaughn in the previous plate appearance. The slider was the pitch Bauers had seen least recently, and sometimes it might just be that simple.
Regardless of the reasoning behind it, the pitch was nearly catastrophic. It was meant for the outside corner, and instead it ended up belt high out over the plate. Here’s a heat map that shows Bauers’ isolated power when he put the ball in play this season.

All the red and pink are up and out over the plate, right where this pitch was located. And it wasn’t just about the location. The location was a byproduct of the fact that this pitch was a hanger. Snell’s average slider this year had 7.2 inches of induced rise and 3.7 inches of glove-side break. This pitch had 9.4 inches of rise and 0.5 inches of horizontal break. It didn’t drop enough, and it basically didn’t slide at all. Snell hanged it and Bauers banged 305 feet — just foul. Whichever person at Dodger Stadium was caught on mic screaming for their life as this ball zoomed toward the foul pole was exactly right.
Pitch 11: Fastball, Home Run
Clearly, Snell wasn’t going back to the slider. At a certain point, the game theory starts to get too complicated to track. Sometimes you need to just throw your best pitch. Man cannot live on breakers alone. Snell threw Bauers his best pitch, and once again he couldn’t locate it. It ended up in almost exactly the same spot as the first pitch of the at-bat, and you should take that very literally. Pythagoras tells us that the ball crossed the plate a mere 0.87 inches closer to the very center of the zone than that first meatball. Bauers, who had been fighting to stay ready for the fastball throughout the entire at-bat, finally got one to hit. This was the ninth fastball Snell had thrown Bauers on the night. You don’t need to squint to see what’s different about it.

Aside from that one overthrown four-seamer earlier in the at-bat, every single one of those fastballs had been buried inside. Snell threw his second meatball of the at-bat, and Bauers was ready to dig in.
This was truly an impressive at-bat. Although Snell, at the end of a brilliant performance, failed to execute several of his pitches, most of his misses were either well out of the zone or within an inch or two of the edge. He threw Bauers every pitch he had, even the changeup. He changed speeds and eye levels. Across 11 pitches, he only threw the same pitch in a row once, and he only repeated the same two-pitch sequence twice. Bauers looked more and more comfortable as the at-bat went on, and when Snell missed over the fat part of the plate, he crushed the ball, twice. He went from taking defensive hacks to stay alive to punishing mistakes. It would be hard to ask for much more on an October evening.





