Author Archive: Michael Baumann

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — The past nine years were the best run in Milwaukee Brewers history: eight postseason appearances, six division titles, 869 regular-season wins, for a 93-win-per-season pace over almost a full decade. An MVP, a Cy Young — probably two, by this time next month — and plenty of turnover: two front office bosses, two field managers, 193 players.

But 11 teams had been to the World Series since 2018; six had won. Not the Brewers. Until this year.

The nervous 12-inning staring contest of Game 4 delayed Milwaukee’s coronation by just one day. Cooper Pratt put the Brewers ahead with an RBI single in the second. Jacob Misiorowski pitched the best game of his postseason career — 5 2/3 scoreless innings with just two singles and a walk allowed — before leaving with a cramp after 86 pitches.

The Brewers’ relentless offense tacked on some insurance runs in the middle innings and their indomitable bullpen held the line. The 4-1 final score reflected the Brewers’ most normal game so far this postseason, after a string of nail-biters and comebacks, punctuated by a massive blowout in Game 3. The most routine win of Milwaukee’s postseason didn’t feel it; the first championship in franchise history can’t be taken for granted until it’s in the bag. Read the rest of this entry »

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — It didn’t always feel like a Rays home game. Multitudes of Brewers fans, unable to procure or afford tickets to Wisconsin’s first World Series games in 44 years, had flown to Florida to see their team clinch. But home field advantage played a part in the Rays’ improbable, dramatic 12-inning 4-3 win in Game 4 to extend the World Series at least one more night.

The Tropicana Field turf is one of the fastest playing surfaces in the league, and the Rays are able to derive an advantage from it that no other team can extract from its own home field. So while the Brewers took the lead in the top of the 12th by hitting the ball in the usual direction — up, in the form of Cooper Pratt’s solo home run — the Rays struck back with four grounders and a liner in the bottom of the inning.

The decisive hit, by Ben Williamson, went straight into the turf, bounced over Milwaukee’s drawn-in five-man infield, and landed… who cares where. The Rays are still alive. Read the rest of this entry »

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Pat Murphy, face stern and wide as ever, stepped forward and cupped his hands to his ears to signal a replay challenge.

With runners on first and second and two out in the top of the fifth inning of Game 3 of the World Series, William Contreras had just topped a ball to third. Instead of making a throw across the diamond, Junior Caminero went the short way for the force at second.

Caminero’s got a big arm, and Contreras is a catcher, but still — the Rays third baseman was on the move and off-balance after spinning to grab the ball. With two outs, Christian Yelich was running on contact, but the 34-year-old doesn’t run like he used to. Might as well go next door. It was a bang-bang play, but second base umpire Dan Bellino called Yelich out. Read the rest of this entry »

MILWAUKEE — You all know the theoretical concept of a replacement-level player. I suspect I’m not the only one who associates that concept with a specific person: The guy who’s continuously mediocre despite repeated exposure to big league competition. The longer he sticks around, the more chances he gets, the more I catch myself thinking, “Why? Can’t they at least try to find someone better?”

Until this year, that guy, for me, was Jake Bauers. In his 20s, Bauers played for seven different organizations, spending six seasons in the majors. In 615 games, he hit .211/.307/.365, which is a wRC+ of 88, with 58 home runs, a 29.0% strikeout rate, and -0.4 career WAR. He was a first baseman, and not an exceptional defender, who hit for neither average nor power, and struck out a lot. He isn’t a great athlete, and as a seventh-round pick out of a high school in Huntington Beach, California, he had neither the prospect pedigree nor the winning collegiate track record that would warrant so many chances.

I didn’t get it, especially because Bauers had toured so many organizations — the Padres, the Rays, the Guardians, the Yankees, and most latterly the Brewers — who have earned a reputation for knowing what they’re doing. Why did this most replaceable of players keep getting chances? Read the rest of this entry »

MILWAUKEE — In the bottom of the sixth inning of Game 2 of the World Series, Brewers right fielder Sal Frelick dug in against Rays reliever Ian Seymour with his team trailing by a run.

Seymour’s first pitch, a sinker, landed right in the middle of the zone for a called strike one.

The Brewers had trailed 4-0 in this game before they’d even come to the plate, but they’d been in this position before. Read the rest of this entry »

MILWAUKEE — The 2026 Brewers aren’t your typical postseason buzzsaw. They’ve won with defense and relief pitching, and their eight postseason victories have come by a combined 13 runs. Half of those games ended either with a Milwaukee walk-off hit, or with the opponent’s tying run on base. Every postseason game the Brewers have played was a one-run game in the sixth or later; they haven’t scored more than seven runs in a game since their 101st regular-season win.

But they are a buzzsaw, and in Game 1 of the World Series — Milwaukee’s first Fall Classic game in 44 years — into the blade went the Tampa Bay Rays. The Brewers put two runs on the board in the top of the first, and they led the rest of the way, albeit not by much. Jacob Misiorowski allowed one run over five innings, tying the longest postseason outing of his career, and the Rays struggled to put a counterattack together until a furious but ill-fated ninth-inning rally.

Round 1 went to the home team, 3-2. Read the rest of this entry »

The way people talk about Jacob Misiorowski bothers me a little. Yeah, he’s taller than almost any other starting pitcher and throws harder than literally any starting pitcher in history. He led all major league pitchers in WAR this year, and if he wins the NL Cy Young Award next month — as he’s almost universally expected to do — it will be a deserved victory.

But Miz didn’t lap the field or post paradigm-altering results. I can’t make a defensible case for Chris Sale or Cristopher Sánchez to win the Cy Young over Misiorowski, but I suspect the eventual vote total will not reflect how close the statistical margin was between Miz and his rivals.

In other words, this is an outstanding pitcher — maybe the best in the world at the moment, perhaps even a future Hall of Famer — but he’s not 1999 Pedro Martínez, or Victor Wembanyama with a curveball. This is a fairly inexperienced 24-year-old with real flaws in his game.

He can be got at. Read the rest of this entry »

LOS ANGELES — The Brewers had the NLCS pretty much in the bag since they struck right back at Blake Snell in the top of the seventh on Wednesday night — it was just a matter of when the coup de grace came. You could argue when it became obvious that they’d log the Dodgers off with a sweep: Was it when they chased Tyler Glasnow, making it clear that this would become yet another battle of bullpens? When Jake Bauers worked his last climactic walk off Alex Vesia to tie the game?

I’ll tell you the exact pitch when I knew that Thursday was going to be the Brewers’ night. William Contreras came to the plate with two on and two out in the top of the fifth, and the Dodgers still up 4-3. Evan Phillips started Contreras off with a first-pitch sweeper, right down the middle for a called strike.

Contreras stepped back from the plate and nodded theatrically. That’s when I knew the Dodgers were drawing dead. Read the rest of this entry »

LOS ANGELES — On Wednesday night at Dodger Stadium, Blake Snell took the mound with his team down 2-0 in the NLCS and made one of the best postseason starts I’ve ever seen. For six scoreless innings, he was nearly unhittable. At one point, he set down 14 Brewers in a row, striking out nine of them. Read the rest of this entry »

MILWAUKEE — Game 1 of the NLCS was an exemplary display of mid-2020s playoff baseball, a dramatic and finely poised showcase of high-powered pitching and expansive defense. Game 2 was a hot dog, loaded with chili and onions, and dropped clumsily down the diner’s shirt.

And yet, the result was the same: The Brewers got the odd solo homer to center to erase an early Dodger lead, and a small-ball run put Milwaukee up for good. This one had a little more action — the 7-4 final marks the highest-scoring NL playoff game this year, as well as the Brewers’ highest offensive output in their past 13 postseason games. They are now halfway toward answering a humiliating sweep in last year’s NLCS with a sweep of their own.

Heroes outnumbered passengers for Milwaukee in Game 2. William Contreras went 3-for-4 with a walk and a monster home run, but four of his teammates also had multi-hit games. Every Brewers position player except Jackson Chourio reached base. As they piled on the insurance runs, four of their pitchers contributed perfect relief stints. When Game 2 started, only two Brewers in history had scored three runs in a playoff game; David Hamilton and Brice Turang both tied that record in the span of three plate appearances. Read the rest of this entry »