MILWAUKEE – The Dodgers have a fight on their hands.
In their 2-1 defeat to the Brewers at American Family Field on Sunday night, the Dodgers were shown what they’re in for in this National League Championship Series.
The Blue-Collar Brewers claimed Game 1 by doing what they did in their 103-win regular season.
They leveraged their bullpen.
They bunted the go-ahead runner into scoring position.
They played clean defense.
Here’s what they didn’t do: They didn’t roll over the way they did last year when the Dodgers swept them in four games at this stage of the postseason.
“You can’t go into a long series against a team that has the best record in baseball and expect to just win in four (games),” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “It’s going to be a long series. We knew it coming in.”
The Brewers played with an edge they didn’t have a year ago, the team’s attitude vocalized before the game by their manager and spirit animal, Pat Murphy.
Speaking about Dodgers starter Tarik Skubal, Murphy said, “I just want to step on his throat, do you know what I mean? I mean that respectfully because I really like Tarik, but I just want to beat him.”
Murphy was joking, but he wasn’t.
The Brewers didn’t exactly step on Skubal’s throat. What they did was more like pinch him into submission, as they tied the game on a Brice Turang homer in the fourth inning and moved ahead on a run they manufactured in the fifth.
Somehow, that was enough for them to win the game on a night in which the Dodgers were able to do to likely Cy Young Award winner Jacob Misiorowski what they did to Braves ace Chris Sale in the previous round.
The Dodgers ran up Misiorowski’s pitch count and forced him out of the game after just 4 ⅓ innings, but they couldn’t break the fireballer.
The second inning was the Dodgers’ most productive inning – but also the most frustrating.
Shohei Ohtani started the inning by drawing a four-pitch walk and advancing to second base on a single by Teoscar Hernández. He was driven in by another single, this one by Andy Pages.
Kyle Tucker followed up with a 10-pitch walk to load the bases with one out, and that brought up Kiké Hernández, who worked a seven-pitch at-bat that ended with an inning-ending double play.
Misiorowski threw 35 pitches in that inning alone, but the Dodgers had only one run to show for it.
The Dodgers extracted a price for the defeat, however, as Misiorowski’s fifth-inning departure resulted in the Brewers using four relievers, including their best three.
“Hopefully in a long series it could prove to be beneficial the more times we see them,” Roberts said.
As dependent as the Brewers were on their bullpen in the regular season, they are even more so now.
Outside of Misiorowski, they have only one other pitcher capable of making traditional starts in the postseason, rookie Logan Henderson.
But the 24-year-old Henderson is by no means an old-school workhorse. In each of his last three regular-season starts, he pitched five innings. In his postseason debut against the San Diego Padres in the Divisional Round, he pitched five innings.
Beyond that, they have right-hander Dustin May and left-hander Robert Gasser. May lasted only three innings in his NLDS start. Gasser wasn’t much better, pitching four.
With the majority of the innings expected to be pitched by the bullpen, the Brewers were likely hoping to minimize the group’s exposure in a game started by Misirowski. The more their high-leverage relievers pitch, the more fatigued they will be later in the series and the more the Dodgers’ hitters will become familiar with them.
DL Hall finished the fifth inning, after which Murphy turned the game over to the Big Three of the Brewers’ bullpen.
Abner Uribe, the team’s second-best reliever, pitched the sixth.
Aaron Ashby, who pitched the second-most relief innings in the majors during the regular season, covered the seventh and eighth.
Closer Trevor Megill took care of the ninth.
The Brewers will have to run this back three more times over the next eight days, which will be extraordinarily difficult against a team with as much experience and depth as the Dodgers.
Can the Brewers take this across the finish line?
Whether they can or not, they promise to scratch and claw until the final out of the series is recorded. The Dodgers know that.
“We didn’t necessarily expect a sweep,” Kiké Hernández said. “It’s gonna be a good series.”
A series that will probably end up back at American Family Field for Game 6, perhaps even Game 7.
