The Bear Up There: Cubs Blank Brewers, Force Game 5

Jeez, I thought the Cubs were dead. These guys got torched both games in Milwaukee, then nearly contrived to blow Game 3 after jumping out to a 4-1 first-inning lead.

Game 4 started much the same way for Chicago, with a three-run first-inning homer by Ian Happ, only this time they didn’t let up. Matthew Boyd slung breaking balls around Milwaukee bats for 4 2/3 scoreless innings, and rather than rest on their first-inning output, as they did in Game 3, the Cubs put up a late-inning picket fence to stretch the final score to a serene 6-0. A decisive Game 5 in Milwaukee awaits.

The Brewers have a lot going for them as a team. Their egalitarian lineup goes eight deep, and is even getting crucial contributions from the likes of Jake Bauers. They’ve got a bunch of relievers with goofy stuff. They’re one of the better defensive teams in the National League and the best baserunning team anywhere. They’re like a triple option football team; so versatile and fundamentally sound they’ll lull you to sleep while rushing for 300 yards on you.

What the Brewers don’t have is a surfeit of knockout starting pitching. Brandon Woodruff is hurt again. Robert Gasser is still slick from the surgical suite. Jacob Misiorowski and Tobias Myers stormed into the rotation with a fury, then played themselves into the bullpen and off the roster, respectively.

Milwaukee’s one capital-G Guy is Freddy Peralta, who was third among qualified starters this year in opponent batting average and eighth in strikeout rate. In Game 1, Peralta allowed four hits and struck out nine in 5 2/3 innings. This contribution went relatively unremarked upon because the Brewers torched Boyd, starting on short rest, for six runs in the first.

But Peralta is the guy the Brewers ought to be able to count on for quality and at least a modicum of length. He’s the guy they want to have the ball with an NLCS bid on the line.

Unfortunately, Peralta spun his wheels when the flag dropped, and he paid the price. He left a curveball middle-middle to Nico Hoerner and was lucky it only ended up as a single. He then walked Kyle Tucker without coming even close to the strike zone. Seiya Suzuki bailed Peralta out by chasing an eye-level fastball, but then Peralta’s luck ran out.

Ian Happ isn’t going to put up 120 mph exit velocities or hit the ball 480 feet. But if you leave a fastball middle-middle, he can hit it out.

Crushing a three-run first-inning homer off your opponent’s ace sure feels like a knockout blow. But you can’t win a game in the first inning; Happ’s homer only raised Chicago’s win probability to 79.3%. In the seven NLDS games (including the Phillies-Dodgers series) before this one, the team that scored first was only 1-6, and in two of those games, the losing team led 3-0 before the end of the second inning.

If the Cubs wanted to convert that Happ home run into a Game 5, they needed to do two things: First, keep the Brewers from responding immediately. And second, stretch the lead.

Boyd, who’d gotten boat raced in his previous start, was much improved in Game 4. He mixed five pitches through his 67-pitch outing, generating 10 whiffs on 31 swings. Four of those came against the slider, which Boyd did not throw in the strike zone one in seven attempts.

That wasn’t a slider, obviously, but Boyd was flipping junk all over the place from his low lefty arm slot. Even Christian Yelich was baffled by a sinker under his hands.

The Brewers managed a decent amount of traffic on the bases, drawing three walks and two hits off Boyd. They had at least one baserunner in five of the first six innings. But nothing got across.

In Game 3, the Cubs let the Brewers hang around, and watched them gradually cut the lead to one. When Jackson Chourio doubled to lead off the top of the eighth, I was convinced the Brewers were going to win.

Cubs manager Craig Counsell guarded the 3-0 lead jealously. When Boyd got into his first real bit of trouble in the fifth, he let the left-hander face Yelich one last time. Then he brought in Daniel Palencia, a high-leverage reliever who accounted for half of Chicago’s 44 regular-season saves, to retire the right-handed Chourio.

Nevertheless, the Brewers could’ve tied the game with one swing at that point. A 3-0 lead isn’t as safe as it looks.

And the Cubs kept passing up opportunities to extend the lead. A two-on, two-out situation in the second went for nothing. The Cubs then loaded the bases with one out for their no. 4 and no. 5 hitters in the fifth; Suzuki once again struck out on a pitch nowhere near the zone. Happ hit a hard line drive that could’ve been a bases-clearing double if it had been hit 10 degrees to either side, but instead it was an easy inning-ending catch for Blake Perkins.

Matt Shaw finally broke the hoodoo in the bottom of the sixth, flicking an Aaron Ashby curveball off his shoelaces into center field for an RBI single, but the Cubs stranded Shaw and Dansby Swanson, leaving it a one-possession game.

But the Cubs kept pushing. The long-suffering Tucker led off the bottom of the seventh with his first playoff home run since Game 1 of the 2022 World Series. And the Cubs nearly broke the dam completely.

With Suzuki on first, Happ got into a hanging sweeper from Gasser and launched it 378 feet at 107.2 mph off the bat. He clearly got under it a little, but even so, it came within about a foot of landing in the idiot basket in front of the left center field fence, rather than Perkins’ glove. Happ will no doubt be happy with his three RBI, since they came with a win, but he came very close to driving in at least eight runs on the night.

The next batter, Carson Kelly, ended up on the wrong side of not one but two replays in a single at-bat. First, he launched a fly ball onto Waveland Avenue, which was judged on replay to have exited the park just on the wrong side of the left field foul pole. Two pitches later, Kelly nearly beat out a grounder to short, but the out call on the field was confirmed.

When Gasser walked Pete Crow-Armstrong to put two on with two out for Swanson, it looked like the Cubs might continue to tack on — walking PCA is never a good sign for a pitcher — but again, the Cubs stranded the runners. Not to worry — Michael Busch tacked on another run with a solo homer in the bottom of the eighth.

By now, the ratio of remaining outs to runs’ worth of lead was getting small, and the spicy end of Chicago’s bullpen had things under control. After Palencia got four outs, Drew Pomeranz pitched a clean inning with two strikeouts, and Brad Keller — who’d erased the eighth-inning threat the night before — erased a walk with a double play. In the end, the lead was big enough to be entrusted to Caleb Thielbar, leaving Andrew Kittredge free to attack a decisive Game 5 on two days’ rest.

The Cubs, who looked overmatched in the first two games, are now headed back up I-94 for a chance to make their first NLCS appearance since 2017. On the way, there’s a Woodman’s supermarket outside Racine with the biggest selection of cheese curds I’ve ever seen in one place at one time. The Cubs should stop there on the drive up for some treats. They’ve earned it.