With backs to wall, Brewers push back
Four-run first inning enables Milwaukee to force Game Seven
MILWAUKEE — All it took was one inning, one single inning, for the silence inside Miller Park to be replaced by booming chants and waving towels and what sounded like a crashing wave of belief, arriving just in time, if not a little early.
The Milwaukee Brewers were only down for a moment Friday night, but they entered Game 6 as if they were down to their last strike of 2018, trailing 3-2 in the best-of-seven National League Championship Series.
The Los Angeles Dodgers looked ready to end the Brewers’ season in any number of ways. And then, just like that, the Brewers were up, and up some more, and riding every bit of a four-run first inning to a 7-2 win that extended their playoff run to a decisive Game 7 here Saturday night.
Jhoulys Chacin, who won Game 3 with 5 1⁄ scoreless
3 innings, was to start Game 7 for Milwaukee against Dodgers rookie Walker Buehler, who pitched seven innings in a 4-0 loss in that Game 3. The winner earns a trip to Boston’s Fenway Park for Tuesday’s Game 1 of the World Series.
As loud as Miller Park was late Friday night, it began the game by having the life sucked out of it by David Freese, the Dodgers’ platooning first baseman. He has a World Series MVP award from his Game 6 heroics as a member of the St. Louis Cardinals seven falls ago.
And so there he was again Friday, leading off for just the fourth time in his career, smacking an opposite-field home run on the fifth pitch thrown by Brewers starter Wade Miley. The Dodgers bounced out of their dugout and formed a jagged line of high-fives for Freese to walk through. The crowd flatlined. None of that lasted long.
The Brewers’ offense crawled into the bottom of the first having scored just two runs across Games 4 and 5. It was the first time since May that they failed to plate more than one run in back-to-back contests. So when Lorenzo Cain led off with a single and two outs followed, and it looked like the slump might seep into another night, any lingering doubt was crushed by the bat of Jesus Aguilar, who stalked an outside change-up and sent it rolling inside the right-field line.
That sent Cain spinning off second and Ryan Braun sprinting from first, and Brewers third-base coach Ed Sedar jogging far down the line to wave them home and punctuate each run with a leaping fist pump. Next came an RBI double by Mike Moustakas and an RBI single by Erik Kratz, and when the first inning was tallied up, the Brewers erased Freese’s home run with four straight twoout hits and four season-saving runs off of Dodgers starter Hyunjin Ryu.
From there, moments big and small triggered bursts of noise from the tens of thousands of revived fans: a routine catch by Aguilar to end the second. A double from Christian Yelich, the MVP front-runner who has struggled all series, in the bottom of that inning. A Braun single that brought Yelich in to score. Corey Knebel’s strikeout of Dodgers shortstop Manny Machado that stranded a runner scoring in position in the fifth.
Anything involving Machado, who was booed throughout all five of his at-bats after he appeared to intentionally kick Aguilar while running through first base toward the end of Game 4. But everything else was cheers, all loud cheers, until the stadium cleared and the countdown to Game 7 began.
Each team had to carefully manage its bullpen with Saturday in mind. Dodgers manager Dave Roberts had to balance riding an ineffective Ryu, to save his relievers for as long as possible, with keeping the game close enough to make Brewers manager Craig Counsell tax his best bullpen options ahead of Game 7. Ryu was hooked after three innings and 22-year-old Julio Urias was the first Dodgers reliever called upon. Then a Freese RBI double off Miley, in the top of the fifth, inched the Dodgers to within three runs and sent Counsell reaching into his bullpen for Knebel.
Ultimately, Counsell’s calculations came out perfectly — his bullpen worked 4 2⁄ hitless in
3 nings without using Josh Hader, the fire-throwing lefty who has been nearly unhittable throughout the postseason. Knebel provided 1 1⁄ scoreless innings. Jere
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Postseason glance
my Jeffress threw a spotless seventh, and in the bottom of the frame, Aguilar scored on a wild pitch from Kenta Maeda that got by Yasmani Grandal. That bumped the Brewers’ lead to four runs, and Hader, standing on the bullpen mound, stopped throwing warmup pitches and watched the proceedings the rest of the way, keeping his arm totally fresh going into the biggest game of his life.
Aguilar singled in another run in the eighth, as Corbin Burnes pitched the final two innings before Hader exited the bullpen to celebrate with his teammates.
Counsell has been picked apart for his unorthodox approach with pitchers, his insistence on letting matchups and situations dictate every move, his use of “bullpenning,” a new-age method that de-emphasizes starters and gives games to a handful of relievers. He pressed the right buttons Friday, even if there was pressure to roll all his best arms onto the field, even if staying away from Hader in a must-win game is the kind of move that could follow a manager forever.
He does not have to worry about that now.
The only thing that mattered for the Brewers and the Dodgers, for the fate of their seasons after eight months of baseball, back to when they first started preparing for the past six games that could not split them apart, is whatever happened inside Miller Park on Saturday night.