It’s Jake Bauerses All The Way Down

After a flyout and a strikeout in his first two attempts, Jake Bauers's third time facing Blake Snell in Wednesday's Game 3 of the National League Championship Series went like this: Bauers took a slider down the middle of the plate for strike one. He took two non-competitive pitches down low to make the count 2-1. He foul tipped a changeup, and then, sitting on two strikes, four pitches into his at bat, he decided that he simply would not strike out again. So he fouled off a slider in the zone, then a curveball. He laid off an inside fastball to draw the count full. Then he managed to foul off a high fastball, and, immediately after, slowed down to catch a changeup in the zone. As the pitch count for this at-bat ticked over into double-digits, Bauers pulled a slider that sat up in the zone a bit too much, sending it into the stands past the right-field foul pole. On the 11th pitch, Bauers made no mistake. Snell threw a middle-middle, 98-mile-per-hour fastball, and Bauers smoked a no-doubt, two-run homer that carried over 400 feet into right field to give the Milwaukee Brewers a 3-2 lead. When his teammate Garrett Mitchell hit his own home run off Snell just two pitches later, it was, comparatively, an anticlimax. Spiritually speaking, a guy hitting a home run one pitch after just missing out on another home run counts for two home runs. Bauers had already won the game; Mitchell's own homer was just overkill on Snell's way out.

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