The single discordant note in the otherwise effervescent National League Divisional Series between the Milwaukee Brewers and San Diego Padres so far was a brief shot of new Padres owners Jose E. Feliciano and Kwanza Jones watching Game 3. It was easy to imagine them, less than two months into the new gig, assuming that it would always be like this. All they know is winning two out of every three games, playing before sold-out houses, and learning cool inside-baseball phrases like "Goddammit, Merrill." They'll find out soon that this sort of thing is too good to last.
This series has not only been the best of the eight played so far in this postseason, but the best in years. Two indisputably accomplished teams, each with very different approaches and without the burdens of franchise legacy, have played taut and delightful baseball replete with stuff like speed, athletic defense, rapid-response scoring, bold tactical choices, and pitching being tested but only occasionally bested. It's the stuff that makes watching your $3.9 billion investment action worth the bother of coming to the park. All that, and "Goddammit, Merrill" too.
The Padres extended the series at least a day with an incandescent 4-3 win Tuesday night, and they now trail the Brewers, the best team in the game during the regular season, 2-1 in a not-enough-games-no-matter-who-wins series. All three games have been decided by one run and hung precariously in the balance to the end. That was most thrilling in Game 2, when Brewers outfielder Jackson Chourio's walk-off hit in the gap scored two runs and stole the result from the Padres and their overpowering Padres closer Mason Miller. Because some ethereal things are happening here, Chourio opened Game 3 with a similar drive, only to have it seized before it landed by a diving San Diego center fielder Jackson Merrill, the name behind the curse.
Merrill has become the fulcrum of the series, and also its reigning meme. That last bit is not for the play he made against Chourio but for a similar one to start the third inning, which occurred while Fox broadcaster and professional dugout lurker Ken Rosenthal was interviewing Brewers manager Pat Murphy. Sal Frelick sent a liner into roughly the same area of the ballpark as Chourio's while Murphy was answering a question. While the ball was still in flight, Murphy broke off his answer, first to exhort his own player and then to blurt out the one phrase baseball should use in lots of promotional videos for the next decade but of course won't:
"Goddammit, Merrill."
Murphy knew the ball was an out while it still looked like a double, giving the viewing public a quick glimpse into what players and managers know instinctively on a batter-by-batter basis, while spicing it up with the language that everyone understands—the kind that's quick, pointed, and PG profane. It was so on point that the rest of the Fox broadcast team could not help but laugh through Joey Ortiz's subsequent at-bat.
Merrill tripled down on his celebrity in the bottom of the inning, after a Samad Taylor single and stolen base, and then a sacrifice bunt (gasp!) by ninth hitter Jake Cronenworth, who had a day worth remembering after a critical Game 2 error that he surely wanted to forget. After a grounder by Fernando Tatis The Younger scored Taylor for the game's first run, Merrill slapped a single to center, stole second, and scored on a base hit to left by Manny Machado to make it 2-0, Padres.
But San Diego had scored first in each of the first two games and ended up with a serious case of ash-mouth for their troubles, so when William Contreras' fourth-inning homer cut the lead to 2-1, a sense grew that the Brewers would patiently prove their superiority and steal the third game as they had the first two. An inning later, they very nearly did it, sending seven hitters to the plate and chasing both starter Nick Pivetta and reliever Jason Adam, but somehow only earning one more run. That failure to finish off the Padres while they were slumping against the turnbuckle ultimately cost Milwaukee the game when Cronenworth turned on a first-pitch sweeper from Brewer reliever JoJo Romero and dropped it seven rows deep into the right-field seats. It was just his second hit of an otherwise quiescent postseason, but his timing was perfect.
The Padres scored again in the sixth, but had to fend off a seventh-inning rally by the mostly left-handed heart of Milwaukee's order and get two quality closer's innings from starter Michael King, who had thrown 72 pitches just two days earlier, to close out a harrowing evening's fun.
King was tossed into the air fryer because San Diego's bullpen had been left worryingly shorthanded, first by Miller's paternity leave—although given that he threw 40 pitches in Game 2, including that Chourio game-winner, he might not have been available even if he hadn't been at bedside—and then by the absence of left-handed specialist Adrian Morejón due to a touchy shoulder. That left the team to navigate the last four innings with the situationally suboptimal Yuki Matsui, Bradgley Rodriguez, and King. That work fell especially heavily upon Rodriguez, who warred through the Brewers' lefty phalanx of Brice Turang, Christian Yelich, and Garrett Mitchell in a situation he would normally have been spared from because of his current status as a right-handed pitcher. Rodriguez survived, and struck out Mitchell with two runners on base in the game's decisive at-bat.
The game was an entertainment triumph, in keeping with the series as a whole. During what has been a bland, doctrinaire, and mostly anticlimactic postseason, Brewers-Padres has been a pyromaniac's delight, with swells of drama and heroism interspersed with moments of prescient profanity. The Padres won Game 3 as a team, but "Goddammit, Merrill" will endure as a bit of spontaneous spice that said everything that needed to be said about the back-and-forth of the sport at its best. If that isn't the definitive phrase of the fall and winter, why does our culture even bother to try?
