Dodgers Go up 3-0 as Search Parties Struggle To Locate Milwaukee Offense

Well, that was fun while it lasted.

Home-field advantage has been a bit of a booby prize this postseason, with the home team losing all five LCS games heading into Thursday evening’s action. The Dodgers’ Game 3 starter, Tyler Glasnow, is arguably the closest thing this rotation has to a weak link. So maybe the Brewers weren’t as dead as the series standings made it seem. Win one and you’re back in it.

Unfortunately for the Brewers, and for neutrals hoping for this series to go six or seven exciting games, that wasn’t in the cards. The Dodgers put a run on the board within their first two batters of the game, and while Milwaukee tied it the next inning, Glasnow shut the door afterward. A couple singles, a walk, and a throwing error in the sixth inning were all the Dodgers needed to win the game, 3-1, and take a 3-0 lead in the series. You already know what the odds are at this point.

The four highest-paid players in this series are the four members of the Dodgers’ playoff rotation: Shohei Ohtani, Blake Snell, Glasnow, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto. Having those four guys healthy and clicking has allowed manager Dave Roberts to run a highly traditional pitching plan in this series. Game 1, Snell struck out 10 in eight scoreless innings, while allowing a single baserunner, whom he picked off first. It was, without exaggeration, one of the best postseason pitching performances of the 21st Century.

Yamamoto followed that up with a one-run, seven-strikeout complete game victory in Game 2; the first batter he faced, Jackson Chourio, homered. No other Brewer reached second base for the rest of the night, and after the bottom of the fourth, no other Brewer even reached first.

Milwaukee’s rotation is neither that strong at the top nor that deep, so until results improve, the openering will continue. Game 1 starter Aaron Ashby, who also faced three batters in relief in Game 2, took the mound again. Ashby’s hard sinker from the left side has the potential to knot up the dangerous lefties in the top half of the L.A. order — Ohtani and Freddie Freeman — and maybe buy a bulk reliever an extra trip through the lineup.

Ohtani didn’t exactly light Ashby up on his leadoff triple in the first inning — he reached for a slider low and away and hooked it into the right field corner at 81.9 mph — but it goes down as a triple in the scorebook. Mookie Betts followed by pulling his hands in and flicking a first-pitch sinker into the right-center gap — squint and you’ll see prime Derek Jeter — to plate Ohtani. Ashby struck out no. 3 hitter Will Smith, but then walked Freeman, the other guy he’d been assigned to get.

The opener has been around long enough now that there’s an orthodoxy about how to manage around it. Usually, you want to use a dedicated reliever — someone who’s used to warming up quickly and entering a game with traffic on the bases — to escape a jam. This is what Brewers manager Pat Murphy did in Game 2 of the NLDS; Ashby got hit, then Nick Mears got out of the inning, leaving the runway clear for his bulk reliever, Jacob Misiorowski.

This time, Murphy went straight for Miz. A few months ago, the lanky, hard-throwing Misiorowski was a controversial All-Star selection, as MLB tried to make a new Paul Skenes happen for a second year in a row. Since then, the rookie has struggled, going from presumptive no. 1 starter to out of the playoff rotation altogether.

But in the postseason, Misiorowski has been terrific. He allowed just one run in seven innings across two multi-inning relief stints against the Cubs, picking up the win on both occasions, including in the decisive Game 5.

And despite his tricky introduction, Misiorowski closed out the first with back-to-back strikeouts. He retired 15 of the first 16 batters he faced, nine of them by punchout. On more than one occasion, he celebrated an inning-ending strikeout by fist-pumping and twirling off the mound, an unusual sight for a pitcher whose on-mound demeanor usually trends toward the morose end of the spectrum.

Having Misiorowski match the $135 million playoff rotation clearly energized the Brewers, and they came close to taking the initiative. With one out in the second inning, Caleb Durbin turned on a Glasnow fastball up and in for a triple of his own. Even with so much game left to play, Roberts pulled the infield in, and Jake Bauers slotted a seeing-eye single up the middle to plate Durbin and tie the game.

Bauers (39 career stolen bases in 613 career games) stole second off Glasnow, who’s even longer and more languid than Misiorowski. (Local fans might’ve confused the two pitchers for a pair of oil derricks, the likes of which are sprinkled across the Southern California hills.) Glasnow compounded the issue with an errant pickoff throw that sent Bauers — who, again, is not exactly Lou Brock — to third.

All of a sudden, the Brewers were the Brewers again, fighting off tough pitches, dumping soft liners in the outfield, advancing on their opponents’ mistakes. (Durbin’s triple probably would have been a double at best had Enrique Hernández not belly-flopped after the ball as it rolled by him.)

In came the infield once more. Only this time, Joey Ortiz put a horrid swing on a curveball well off the outside corner and yanked it toward third base. Max Muncy, whom I usually think of as an unbudging tungsten cube who happens to walk 20% of the time, has recently been possessed by the spirit of Brooks Robinson. He played the ball perfectly and threw Bauers out at the plate. Glasnow was out of the inning one pitch later, and the Brewers never scored again.

Glasnow wasn’t as flashy as his two rotation-mates (or Misiorowski), but he was plenty good enough: eight strikeouts, three hits, three walks in 5 2/3 innings.

In all three of their NLDS wins against the Phillies, the Dodgers were pretty hapless offensively the first two times through the order. But they got the last word in every time, with just enough offense to stay alive: two runs in the sixth and three in the seventh in Game 1, four runs in the seventh in Game 2, one run to tie in the bottom of the seventh inning in Game 4.

The same thing happened here. I said earlier that Misiorowski retired 15 of his first 16 batters; the last three men he faced all reached. The magic was clearly starting to fade; Smith smoked a middle-middle fastball at 108.1 mph for a single, and Freeman drew a walk to put Smith in scoring position. Then Tommy Edman sliced a first-pitch slider almost off the dirt and into the outfield in front of center fielder Sal Frelick. Coming in on the ball as he was, Frelick might’ve had a play on either Smith at home or Freeman at third, but his throw was cut off and redirected to third too late to get Freeman.

By now, the season was well and truly on the line, so Murphy called in his best available reliever, Abner Uribe, for work in the sixth inning. Uribe is one of the hardest-throwing pitchers in the game, but bringing him in mid-inning with runners on is a little like trying to mount a tractor tire on a wheel rim by filling it with WD-40 and lighting it on fire. If it works, it’s cool as hell. But there are risks to combining petrochemicals, compressed air, and flame in an enclosed space, and from time to time the physics gods make known their displeasure.

Uribe’s command being what it is, I did not expect him to plate an insurance run with yet another throwing error on a pickoff. Curt Hogg of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel noted that Uribe had not allowed a stolen base in the majors since 2023; why he was so concerned with Edman we’ll never know.

Just as in the NLDS, all the Dodgers’ opponent can really ask for is one good shot at the squishy underbelly between the starter and Roki Sasaki. The Brewers got one when Durbin led off the seventh with a double to bring the tying run to the plate. They even got two of their best hitters — Isaac Collins and Chourio — to the plate against Blake Treinen. If putting out a rally with Uribe is like trying to mount a tire with an explosion, putting out a rally with Treinen is like trying to plunge a lit match into a pool of gasoline before it ignites the vapor.

But Collins popped out, and Chourio, who’d left Game 1 against the Cubs with a hamstring injury, pulled up with cramps, leaving pinch-hitter Blake Perkins to take over an 0-2 count with two out. Even if he can’t locate it, Treinen’s sweeper remains a truly nasty pitch. Given a two-strike head start, he managed to throw one in the right place eventually, back-footing Perkins, who was drawing dead the instant he thought about moving his bat.

For what it’s worth, the Brewers’ seat-of-the-pants pitching approach has been pretty solid so far this series. The Dodgers scored 5.1 runs per game this regular season, the highest mark among NL teams, and the Brewers have held them to 10 runs (nine earned) over three games.

But every year we wonder if the Brewers can scratch out enough offense to capitalize on their pitching, and every year it’s the same old song. They’ve scored one run in each of the three games of the NLCS; by the time Misiorowski entered in the bottom of the first, the Brewers had already allowed as many runs as their offense has been capable of scoring in a game this series. Miz could’ve pumped heat and conjured unhittable curveballs until New Year’s Eve and it wouldn’t have mattered.

That ill-timed offensive outage will, once again, be the first line of the Brewers’ obituary. Unless they somehow defy the odds and come down from 3-0, in which case, feel free to shove this back in my face when Fever Pitch 2 comes out.