The Brewers Flatten the Mets in the (First) Jackson Chourio Game

One of the fun things about the new Wild Card format is that after the first day, every game is an elimination game. On Wednesday, all four games could have ended with one team heading home and one team punching its ticket for the next round. Three of them ended that way, and the one game left on the docket Thursday will end that way too, after the Brewers beat the Mets to even the National League Wild Card Series at one game apiece.

That kind of pressure is nothing new for the Mets, who spent pretty much the entire season dancing on a knife’s edge, but it’s certainly an unfamiliar feeling for the Brewers, whose playoff odds hadn’t dropped below 75% since May or below 90% since early August. “I’m going to be honest with you: It’s hard to be tired when you’re playing playoff baseball,” New York third baseman Mark Vientos said following Tuesday’s Game 1 win. “I had a bunch of energy. I know all of us did.” The Mets certainly didn’t come out flat on Wednesday night, but they did come out horizontal.

I’ll explain what I mean by that in a moment, but I shouldn’t bury the lede any longer: This was the Jackson Chourio Game. Or at least it was the first Jackson Chourio Game; we could be in for a lot more Jackson Chourio Games over the next decade or two. The 20-year-old, who entered the season as the no. 5 prospect in baseball, has already emerged as one of the game’s best young talents, and now he’s made it clear that he’s absolutely nails in the playoffs. In Wednesday’s NL Wild Card Series Game 2 (Jackson Chourio Game 1), the Brewers left fielder ripped two game-tying home runs in a 5-3 Milwaukee win.

Sean Manaea and Frankie Montas faced off as starting pitchers for the second time in six days, and it really felt like a bizzaro-world repeat of last Friday’s regular-season matchup. In that game, Montas struck out six Mets, allowing two hits and two earned runs over four innings. Manaea got shelled, giving up seven hits and six runs (five earned) over 3 2/3 innings. Naturally, in Wednesday’s bizarro-ballgame, Manaea was the dominant one, while Montas looked iffy and surrendered the unearned runs. The Milwaukee fans exploded when Montas started off the game with a 97-mph called strike to Francisco Lindor. They were also fairly loud five pitches later, booing home plate umpire Chris Segal when Montas walked Lindor on a pitch that wasn’t particularly close to the zone. A fielder’s choice and an infield hit later, Brandon Nimmo drove in the game’s first run with a groundball just to the right of first baseman Rhys Hoskins.

Just like that, the Mets were in the driver’s seat. Both OAA and DRS rate the Brewers as one of the top-three defensive teams in baseball. Second baseman Brice Turang led all players with 21 Defensive Runs Saved, and he may well win a Platinum Glove this season. In true bizarro fashion, the Mets got their production by hitting a succession of seeing-eye groundballs to the right side of the infield. During the game, Matthew Trueblood noted that when opponents hit grounders and low liners toward the second baseman’s territory this season, the Brewers allowed an on-base percentage of just .210, the lowest in baseball. Maybe we can add that to the list of stuff that doesn’t work in the playoffs. The inning ended when Willy Adames started a double play with a diving stop on a Pete Alonso grounder. Alonso may have had a chance to beat the throw, but he somehow stepped on his own bat coming out of the box, and after just a few steps, he tumbled to the ground hard enough to raise a cloud of dust.

It was the first time of many that a Met would end up sprawled horizontal on the American Family Field turf. In the bottom of the inning, however, it was the Brewers who picked themselves up and dusted themselves off. Leading off, Chourio wasted no time in making his presence known. He sent Manaea’s third pitch of the game, a sinker on the outside part of the plate, into the right field stands at 103.4 mph.

One swing, and it was once again anybody’s game. It was also time for Manaea to take over, orienting the game horizontally in his own way. Halfway through the season, the left-hander famously looked at Cy Young frontrunner Chris Sale and decided, “Sure, I can do that too,” and on Wednesday, well, he pretty much did. We’ve spent a fair amount of time on this website talking about horizontal approach angle, and Manaea is now angling to be its poster boy. He spent the evening leveraging his new cross-body, sidearm throwing motion, slinging the ball with a release point somewhere in the vicinity of the first base dugout. If you’re a left-handed hitter with one of his sinkers coming from way back behind you, it must look like there’s no way in the world that it could possibly end up in the strike zone. If you’re a right-hander watching a slider bore in on you, it must look like it’s coming for your soul. For most of his outing, whenever he needed it, Manaea was able to reach into his back pocket for an unhittable backfoot sweeper that no hitter could lay off, or maybe a fastball on the black that left the hitter with no choice but to watch it go by and then mope back to the dugout.

On the other side, Montas spent four innings riding the line. He pitched just well enough to stay in the game, but just poorly enough to keep the bullpen in a state of alarm. Joe Ross started warming in the second inning, and the Mets seemed to spend half the game with runners on first and third. Montas never surrendered the killing blow, instead allowing runs on two singles and a sacrifice fly. It started with the Mets roaring back in the second inning – and when I say roaring, I mean that Starling Marte hit a routine grounder to first base and Hoskins made a perfect toss that clanked off Montas’ glove for an error. It was the second straight game in which a Brewers pitcher failed to make the play while covering first, and the second straight game in which it cost the team runs. Montas then gave up a bloop single to Tyrone Taylor, a line drive single to Francisco Alvarez, and a sacrifice fly to Lindor.

Two unearned runs, and the Mets were back on top with a 3-1 lead. “Covering first, dropping the ball,” said manager Pat Murphy, “both those ended up being runs. You can’t do that.”

In the bottom of the inning, Lindor made the defensive play of the game, chasing down a ball several feet to the right side of second base, then unleashing a spinning throw to nab the speedy Sal Frelick at first. It was quintessential Lindor, combining instincts, effort, athleticism, and awareness into one jaw-dropping package.

In the fourth, the Mets once again found a way to lie down on the job. Marte led off with yet another single through the right side, then stole second. He was initially called out, so in order to demonstrate just how confident he was that he had beaten the throw, he made a show of lounging on the base that he had stolen fair and square. It was unclear at the time of publication whether any of the Brewers took the opportunity to draw him like one of their French girls.

Montas struck out the next two batters, and rather than let him face the top of the lineup for a third time, Murphy let him end on a high note, pulling him for in favor of Trevor Megill. Montas had a final line of 3 2/3 innings, six hits, and three runs (one of them earned, but all of them his fault in a cosmic sense). In the bottom of the inning, as Manaea flummoxed Milwaukee’s batters, cameras caught Murphy in the tunnel, intensely paging through a stapled scouting packet. Presumably he was looking for the section that explained how to score runs.

He must have found it too, because in the bottom of the fifth, Manaea allowed his only other extra-base hit, a chopper that the lefty hitting Turang slapped down the third base line for a double. Over the first two games of the series, Turang is 5-for-8 with three doubles. A Chourio groundout moved Turang to third, and Blake Perkins drove him in with a sacrifice fly to deep center, pulling the Brewers to within one run.

Manaea induced a groundout from catcher William Contreras to end both the inning and his night. His final line — five innings, four strikeouts, six hits, and two earned runs — undersells the knots he tied the Brewers in.

In the bottom of the sixth, Garrett Mitchell entered the game to pinch run for Gary Sánchez and got caught stealing two pitches later. Iglesias had to go horizontal in order to apply the tag.

I realize that I’m making a meal of this, but the Mets really did spend an inordinate amount of time on the ground. Really.

The score stayed at 3-2 until the eighth inning. Murphy didn’t hesitate to bring in the cream of his already extremely creamy bullpen to keep the game close. He made it to the ninth inning with 4 1/3 scoreless innings from Megill, Joel Payamps, Jared Koenig, and Ross.

The Mets got scoreless innings from Reed Garrett and Ryne Stanek, but their biggest weapon, closer Edwin Díaz never got up. Díaz threw 40 pitches to clinch New York’s postseason berth on Monday and 26 the day before that, but he was available after resting on Tuesday. When asked why Díaz didn’t enter the game, manager Carlos Mendoza simply said, “We didn’t get to him.”

That brings us to the eighth inning. Rather than Díaz, Mendoza brought in Phil Maton to face the top of Milwaukee’s lineup. Maton has had an excellent season, but he hasn’t been New York’s go-to guy in high-leverage situations. Hanging onto a one-run lead, Mendoza also brought in defensive replacements. That didn’t worry Chourio in the slightest. The best defense may be a good offense, but Chourio has clearly learned that the best offense is to hit something undefendable. Maton threw a cutter out over the plate, and Chourio sent his second solo homer of the night into right field, knotting the game at three. The 105.5-mph blast bounced off the façade of the second deck and had a projected distance of 398 feet. Chourio is now 4-for-8 in the series with two home runs, for a cool 383 wRC+.

“I think I still feel the adrenaline,” Chourio said. “It was a very special moment for me, and it’s one I’m going to look back on and remember for the rest of my life.” We’ll remember it too.

After a Perkins single and a double play, Adames checked in with a liner through the left side of the infield. At that point, Maton, who pitched on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, had allowed four balls in play, and three of them had been hit over 100 mph. He may well have been running on fumes, but it all happened so fast. There wouldn’t have been time for Mendoza to get another reliever warm even if he wanted to, but there was almost certainly enough time for him to regret not bringing in Díaz to face the heart of Milwaukee’s lineup. Mitchell, who was left off the roster for last season’s Wild Card matchup against the Diamondbacks, came to the plate next for some vindication. Maton served up a first-pitch curveball out over the plate – just where the Brewers like it – and Mitchell got every bit of it. The 107.7-mph home run hit off the top of the wall in right-center, giving the Brewers a 5-3 lead. “You dream of moments like that,” Mitchell said after the game.

Closer Devin Williams needed 10 pitches to set the Mets down in order in the ninth and send the series to a winner-take-all showdown on Thursday.

As you’ve probably noticed, when I write about a playoff game, I like to pepper in highlight clips from MLB.com. During the playoffs, they’ll post clips of big, exciting plays within a couple minutes. None of the Mets’ three runs went up for well over an hour, because they consisted of a seeing-eye grounder, a solid single, and a sac fly. Nothing exciting, nothing flashy, but still enough to bring a team that spent 173 days in first place this season to within four outs of elimination. “Look, you’re going to get kicked in the teeth,” Murphy told the Brewers after their loss on Tuesday. “It’s about a response.” The Brewers had no trouble responding, erasing two deficits to win the ballgame and one to tie the series. Unlike the Mets, who out-homered the Brewers by 30 during the regular season, Milwaukee did it by putting the ball in the air. Still, that wasn’t a very fitting way for the game to be decided.

It wasn’t just Manaea’s god-tier horizontal approach angle or New York’s penchant for ending up horizontal on the playing surface. The game just wasn’t very vertically oriented. Of its 10 hardest-hit balls, seven were grounders. The other three were the Milwaukee home runs. For a second straight day, the Mets will be looking to win their first playoff series since 2015, when they lost to the Royals in the World Series. For a second straight day, they’re going to need a better plan for retiring Chourio. Both teams have been knocked down. Now we’ll see who can get back up.