The Brewers Are Walking Down Their Wounded Prey

I like to imagine a wised-up contrarian reading Ray Ratto's blog about the Milwaukee Brewers' Game 1 victory over the Los Angeles Dodgers, which identifies a formula in the way the Brew Crew are progressing through the National League playoffs. It's not a vague, vibes-based formula that Ratto describes, either: He says Milwaukee's opponent scores first "but cannot make a big inning out of its opportunity;" he says the Brewers "catch up quickly" and then nose ahead; he says Milwaukee's starter "goes four innings" and then hands it over to Milwaukee's bullpen; he says the bullpen slams the door, making a narrow margin on the scoreboard feel approximately as vast and daunting as a snow-bound glacier-capped mountain range. I like to think of this hypothetical smirking contrarian—I even have the face and voice of a former shit-eating acquaintance in mind as I type this—rolling their eyes at this so-called "formula." Sure, but this is baseball, and there's too much variance in baseball for formulas, says our contrarian, then somehow wedges the word "orthogonal" and a reference to Ayn Rand into an unwanted sermon on randomness and regression. I like to imagine this contrarian then watching Milwaukee's 7–4 victory in Game 2 and becoming so flustered and irritated by the process and outcome that they call out of work the next two days, just to delay their own reckoning. It was downright spooky how closely the Brewers followed their formula Monday night. The Dodgers scored runs in the first and third innings, each time to go up a run, but failed in both cases to extend and exploit their opportunities, both times when an observably unwell Shohei Ohtani made the third out. The Brewers answered both runs with runs of their own, yoinking momentum back their way and chipping away at Dodgers starter Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who needed 25 pitches to get out of the first inning and another 22 pitches to record the first two outs of the third. Milwaukee nosed ahead on a two-out, two-run third-inning single to center, and chased a gassed Yamamoto from the game. Milwaukee's own starter, Logan Henderson, completed the requisite four solid innings but gave back the lead at the start of the fifth, and was yanked. The Dodgers again failed to put together a sustained rally, and the Brewers immediately countered with another run of their own.

Read it at Defector ↗

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