Blake Snell stood on the mound with his hand on his hip, waiting for Jake Bauers to cross the plate before punching in his pitch call for the next batter.
The Dodgers left-hander had just given up the lead on Bauers’ two-run homer in the seventh inning, spoiling what had been a stellar start Wednesday night at Dodger Stadium. But Snell was ready to move on.
Two pitches later, he watched another ball fly over the fence, this time off Garrett Mitchell’s bat. And with it went the last of the Dodgers’ momentum in what would become a 6-2 loss to the Milwaukee Brewers in Game 3 of the National League Championship Series.
“It sucks,” Snell said of falling behind 3-0 in the series. “But it’s part of it. How do we bounce back? How do we fight? I think that’s the most important thing. It’s us coming together and finding a way to win.”
After setting their sights on a history-making three-peat, the Dodgers will have to win the next four games to advance to the World Series.
Only one team in MLB history has come back from a 3-0 deficit to win a best-of-seven series — the 2004 Red Sox in the American League Championship Series against the New York Yankees, on their way to breaking the Curse of the Bambino.
“At the beginning of this year, we set out to do something historic,” veteran third baseman Max Muncy said. “It looks like we’re going to have to make a little more history along the way if we want to accomplish that.
“That’s the task ahead of us. We still have the pitching staff to be able to do it. We just have to get some hits.”
For five innings, the only run on the board was the one the Brewers scored on the first pitch of the game.
Snell zipped a 97.6-mph fastball over the center of the plate, and Brewers leadoff hitter Jackson Chourio sent it into the first row of the stands in right-center.
For much of Snell’s start, however, that aggressive approach worked. He dotted the upper rail with his fastball, threw his curveball for both swings and misses and called strikes, and mixed in his changeup to right-handed batters.
Unlike Snell’s last postseason start, when he issued five walks and lasted just 3-2/3 innings against the Atlanta Braves, his efficiency got him through six-plus innings Wednesday, with just two walks.
And while Snell’s fastball averaged 97 mph in his last start — something he’d done only twice before in his career, regular season or postseason, and not since 2022, according to Statcast — he threw even harder on Wednesday: 97.3 mph.
After Chourio’s home run, Snell retired 18 of the next 20 batters, including 14 in a row, to get through six innings. His nine strikeouts were one shy of a postseason career high, which he recorded against the Brewers last year in Game 1 of the NLCS.
The game was still far from decided going into the bottom of the sixth, even though the Dodgers’ offense had been quiet.
With the way the Brewers’ bullpen pitched in the first two games, it seemed the Dodgers would have to score against the Brewers’ starters to have a chance to pull themselves out of the hole they’d dug.
They failed to do so in Game 3, logging just three hits off left-hander Robert Gasser.
Luckily for the Dodgers, pitching every game of the postseason seemed to finally have caught up to hard-throwing right-hander Abner Uribe in his seventh appearance.
Uribe took over for Gasser in the sixth inning and walked the first two batters.
Milwaukee’s Jake Bauers homers off Snell in the seventh inning of Game 3.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Then Dodgers manager Dave Roberts had left-handed-hitting Max Muncy pinch-hit for Andy Pages. Muncy struck out, and the biggest moment of the game fell to two Dodgers who have had the worst postseason production on the team.
Roberts had moved Shohei Ohtani down to sixth in the batting order and put Will Smith behind him. Naturally, the game found them.
In a short-lived comeback story, they came through.
Ohtani drew a five-pitch walk without taking a swing. With the bases loaded, it was up to Smith, who had gone one for 25 in the postseason to that point.
He ambushed a first-pitch sinker and drove it into the left-field gap for a two-run double and the lead.
“It’s really hard to put it into words, because you feel like you finally break through,” veteran utility player Miguel Rojas said. “Will the big hit, you feel really good for him, because we all know he’s been struggling at the plate, getting the opportunities and now being able to come through.”
The rally halted there. Roberts burned rookie Josue De Paula as a pinch-hitter, swapping him out for Kiké Hernández when the Brewers brought in left-hander DL Hall. Hernández and Tommy Edman struck out to end the inning.
“That was the game right there,” Hernández said. “We need to put the ball in play; I didn’t. I struck out and gave Tommy a way harder job with two outs. Just have to be better tomorrow.”
Snell jogged back to the mound with a lead for the first time. He issued a leadoff walk to Andrew Vaughn. And then Bauers locked him into an 11-pitch battle — the second time in as many games that Bauers worked a Dodgers starter for double-digit pitches — that ended with a fastball over the middle of the plate.
“What an at-bat,” Snell said. “I threw everything I had. Fastball down the middle — if I can locate that better, who knows what would happen. It’s the best I’ve ever seen him play.”
Snell hadn’t given up a home run all season — not in his nine regular-season starts or his division series start. Three on Wednesday defined his defeat.
“To have three in a game is pretty frustrating,” Snell said. “It’s something I’ve got to learn from. It’s part of their journey too. It’s only going to make me better.”
The next inning, the Brewers added an insurance run with back-to-back singles against right-hander Roki Sasaki and a wild pitch from left-hander Justin Wrobleski. They tacked on another in the ninth with a pair of singles and a stolen base off Wrobleski.
With the flash of red taillights flickering outside of the stadium, a sign of fans already heading for the exits, the Dodgers went down in order to end the game.
“This is uncharted territory for us, especially the last two years,” Rojas said. “It’s kind of a tough one to kind of wrap your head around, especially with the talent that we have in this group and the way that we know we’re capable of playing, especially on the offensive part of the ball.
“With that being said, I feel like there’s nothing for us to kind of do or say. It’s just more of, come here tomorrow, we have another opportunity to win a baseball game and believe in a potential streak of four games in a row.”