{"id":928909,"date":"2026-10-15T09:52:27","date_gmt":"2026-10-15T09:52:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/928909\/"},"modified":"2026-10-15T09:52:27","modified_gmt":"2026-10-15T09:52:27","slug":"bauers-blast-has-brewers-on-the-brink-of-world-series","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/928909\/","title":{"rendered":"Bauers blast has Brewers on the brink of World Series"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Game Two of the NLCS on Monday, Jake Bauers had what was one of the best at-bats<\/a> in the history of the franchise. Against Yoshinobu Yamamoto, one of the best postseason pitchers of his generation, he worked a 12-pitch walk, which was followed by a two-run single that chased Yamamoto and sent the Brewers on their way.<\/p>\n

That at-bat had a short reign as the best at-bat of Bauers\u2019 career.<\/p>\n

With one out in the seventh inning, against a cruising ace, just after the Dodgers had gotten to Abner Uribe, seized a late lead, and snagged all of the game\u2019s momentum, Bauers one-upped himself. He battled Blake Snell for 11 pitches, the last of which ended up deep into the right field seats at Dodger Stadium. The Brewers never looked back.<\/p>\n

Bauers wasn\u2019t the only hero. Jackson Chourio homered on the game\u2019s first pitch. Garrett Mitchell followed Bauers with a homer of his own. Robert Gasser was huge, with five scoreless innings. DL Hall had one of the biggest moments of any Brewer reliever in a postseason full of big moments for Brewer relievers. The defense looked good. But Bauers grabbed the headlines and the memories, and the Brewers now just need one win in four tries to get somewhere they haven\u2019t been in 44 years: the World Series.<\/p>\n

Milwaukee got things going right away. On the very first pitch of the game, Chourio jumped on a fastball down the middle and hit it over the wall in right field. It was the last thing the Dodgers needed, and a huge early jolt for the visiting team, as Milwaukee took an early 1-0 lead. With his third career postseason leadoff homer, Chourio moved into a tie for second on the all-time list for leadoff home runs in the playoffs. Here\u2019s where I remind you he is 22.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a good thing they got to Snell when they did. After Chourio\u2019s homer, Snell struck out the next three batters on just 11 pitches. In the second, he allowed a couple of baserunners\u2014Mitchell walked and Cooper Pratt singled with one out\u2014but he got out of that jam, and then completely locked in. After Pratt\u2019s single, Snell retired the next 14 in a row. He looked dominant in doing so.<\/p>\n

In a twist that few would have seen coming, though, Gasser was ready to match Snell. He did it very differently\u2014Gasser wasn\u2019t working with strikeout stuff, and he got some help from his defense (as seen by Luis Lara\u2019s play in the second inning, shown below)\u2014but the Dodgers found themselves unable to square him up. He scattered a few hits and dealt with leadoff baserunners three times, but no runner advanced past second, and the Dodgers never felt like they got much of a threat going against the Brewer lefty. Gasser even stayed in to face the top of the order a third time; with a runner on first base and one out, Mookie Betts hit a hard line drive to center that was caught on a slide by Mitchell, and Freddie Freeman grounded out harmlessly to end the fifth, and Gasser\u2019s evening.<\/p>\n

It was a fantastic outing for the young Brewer lefty. Building off of his good showing in San Diego\u2014when he allowed one run on three hits in four innings\u2014Gasser went five scoreless, with three strikeouts, three hits allowed, one walk, and a hit batter.<\/p>\n

After Snell threw a fourth straight perfect inning in the sixth, the Brewer bullpen took over, with Uribe on to face the middle of the Dodger lineup. Uribe, though, didn\u2019t have it today. He walked Teoscar Hern\u00e1ndez and Kyle Tucker on just nine pitches, which injected major life into the Los Angeles crowd. Dave Roberts, sensing a moment, pulled Andy Pages to get Max Muncy an at-bat versus the right-handed Uribe, an aggressive but understandable move with Uribe needing to face another batter. Muncy got ahead of Uribe 2-1, but Uribe found it and came back to strike out Muncy.<\/p>\n

With Hall warm in the bullpen, Pat Murphy made a surprising non-move: he let Uribe stay in to face Shohei Ohtani. Uribe still couldn\u2019t find the zone; he walked Ohtani on five pitches, and the bases were loaded with one out for Will Smith. Smith, knowing that Uribe badly needed a first-pitch strike, sat on the fastball and got one right down the middle\u2014he blasted it off the wall in left for a two-run double that gave the Dodgers a 2-1 lead.<\/p>\n

Murphy has made all the right moves all postseason thus far, and it\u2019s difficult to second guess him\u2026 but not pulling Uribe for Hall against Ohtani was a mistake that you could see coming. Uribe has worked a lot, and he didn\u2019t have it tonight. After the Dodgers announced Josue De Paula as a pinch-hitter, Murphy removed Uribe for Hall, and Roberts countered by replacing De Paula with Kik\u00e9 Hern\u00e1ndez. With runners on second and third and one out, Hall struck out Hern\u00e1ndez and Tommy Edman to keep the Dodgers at two\u2014a huge pair of outs from the Brewer lefty.<\/p>\n

Now, though, the Brewers needed to get something cooking against a starting pitcher who\u2019d been absolutely mowing them down ever since the second pitch of the game. Snell was only up to 81 pitches, and he still had not allowed a baserunner since Pratt\u2019s one-out single in the second inning. But he\u2019d been sitting a while. Finally, leading off the seventh inning, the Brewers ended Snell\u2019s run of 14 straight when Andrew Vaughn worked a seven-pitch walk, which got the bullpen moving for Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

Christian Yelich replaced Vaughn as a pinch runner while Bauers came up to the plate. With Bauers\u2019 long at-bat against Yamamoto fresh on the mound, and with Snell approaching 90 pitches, the Brewers hoped Bauers might work another long at-bat.<\/p>\n

So he got ahead 2-1. On 2-2, he fouled off a couple pitches. He worked to 3-2. He fouled off another pitch. And then another. Then he hit one hard down the right-field line, one that looked like it might be going out off the bat\u2026 but it went foul too.<\/p>\n

The next one did not go foul. Bauers got a middle-middle fastball on the eleventh pitch of the at-bat and he detonated it. He hit it 109.4 mph deep into the seats in right field, a two-run homer that flipped the scoreboard back in the Brewers\u2019 favor. Two days after his 12-pitch at-bat that sparked Milwaukee\u2019s rally against Yamamoto, an 11-pitch at-bat ended even better against Snell. A remarkable moment.<\/p>\n

The Brewers weren\u2019t done with Snell. With Mitchell, a lefty, up, Roberts tried to get one more batter out of his starter. It was a bad idea. Mitchell got a 1-0 changeup that got way too much of the plate, and Mitchell blasted it even harder and further than Bauers had, a 111.5 mph, 428-foot, no-doubt shot that doubled Milwaukee\u2019s lead.<\/p>\n

Hall continued for the Brewers in the bottom of the seventh, now pitching with a 4-2 lead. He got some help from his defense: Joey Ortiz made a nice pick on a short hop to get Betts for the first out, and Chourio made a nice running catch for the second. Ortiz made another fine play on a weak ground ball, and Hall had taken his turn in the Brewer bullpen spotlight: five batters, five outs, two high-level-of-difficulty inherited runners stranded.<\/p>\n

Roki Sasaki started the eighth for the Dodgers, but he was getting a lot of plate. Turang reached on a check-swing infield single with one out, and Contreras followed with a base hit up the middle, putting runners on the corners with one out for Yelich, who was getting his first at-bat of the game. Roberts moved to lefty Justin Wrobleski for Yelich, who faced a drawn-in infield. He just missed an extra-base hit on a chopper down the left-field line that was called foul on the first pitch he saw (upon further review\u2026 it really looked like it may have been fair), but it turned out the Brewers didn\u2019t need Yelich to come through to get that insurance run: a ball in the dirt squirted away from Smith, both runners advanced, and the Brewers took a 5-2 lead. Wrobleski struck out Yelich and Bauers to end the inning, but Milwaukee now had a three-run lead that they only needed to protect for six more outs.<\/p>\n

Hall, having a night, stayed on for the bottom of the eighth. Tucker put up a battle to lead off the inning, but he\u2019s no Bauers, and he flew out to center on the eighth pitch of the at-bat. Hall then had a favorable matchup against Muncy, who\u2019d entered for Pages in the sixth, and Muncy popped out. With two outs, Ohtani ripped a single at 114 mph up the middle\u2014by far the best contact of the series for him\u2014and Hall was removed in favor of closer Trevor Megill, who was brought in to face Smith. Smith flew out harmlessly to Lara in right, and the Dodgers were down to three outs.<\/p>\n

Pratt picked up his third hit of the game in the top of the ninth, and with two outs he moved to second with a stolen base. Ortiz, who looked a bit better at the plate today but had some tough BABIP luck, snuck one through this time\u2014a grounder got past Muncy into left field, and Pratt scored. Classic Brewers baseball. Chourio bounced out to end the inning but Megill, a pitcher unused to getting more than three outs, now had a four-run lead to work with.<\/p>\n

It turned out Megill did not need the extra cushion. He calmly retired the Dodgers in order, and the Brewers had a 6-2 victory and a 3-0 series lead.<\/p>\n

What a remarkable, resilient team. After looking helpless against Snell for the bulk of the game, and after the Dodgers finally broke through against the Brewer bullpen in the sixth, Bauers, Mitchell, and the Brewers struck back with a sledgehammer. The Bauers homer is immediately one of the greatest moments in the history of the franchise. Mitchell\u2019s was another exclamation point. But let\u2019s not forget Hall\u2019s work; his two strikeouts in the previous inning, in retrospect, could not have been bigger.<\/p>\n

The Brewers, improbably, have a chance to close the series tomorrow night. That game is at 7pm. Tyler Glasnow will start for the Dodgers, and we\u2019ll see what the Brewers do with their pitching staff; it\u2019s likely we\u2019ll see Dustin May, and I\u2019d bet you some money that Aaron Ashby will feature big time given that he didn\u2019t end up getting used tonight.<\/p>\n

For now, I\u2019ll just be thinking about this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Game Two of the NLCS on Monday, Jake Bauers had what was one of the best at-bats…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":928910,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[558],"tags":[64,63,338159,591,85],"class_list":["post-928909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-milwaukee-brewers-scores-standings","tag-mlb","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/928909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=928909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/928909\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/928910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=928909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=928909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=928909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}