For the second game in a row, the Milwaukee Brewers allowed a handful of first-inning runs en route to a loss. Unlike in Wednesday's close and competitive 4-3 defeat in Game 3, the Brewers in Game 4 would not have fared too much worse had they hired out their jobs to a squad of discount impersonators. Not even baseball impersonators!
Chicago Cubs starter Matthew Boyd—the same Matthew Boyd the Brewers chased out of the first inning in Game 1—flummoxed Milwaukee's generally pesky lineup Thursday, holding Brewers batters to two hits and three walks in four-plus innings of work, on just 67 pitches. Milwaukee advanced runners into scoring position just twice against Boyd, and then not at all against Chicago's bullpen. Cubs relievers recorded 13 outs on just 50 pitches, with one hit and one walk scattered in there. By the end of the game, it felt like the Brewers might never score another run, not just in this series or postseason but ever again.
It's been a pretty fun series if what you like is early scoring. The Cubs have scored at least one run in each first inning, and Game 4 was the first time in the series that the Brewers did not score at least one of their own. That spelled doom: Through four games, the team that led on the scoreboard after the first inning, or took the first lead after a first-inning tie, won the game. Brewers hitters seemed to understand this intuitively Thursday, and thus treated every inning after the first as a funeral march. The early deficit, Boyd's precision, and the booming enthusiasm of Chicago's home crowd swept the fight entirely out of them.
"This crowd affected the game the last two games, it affected the way we played for sure," said Brewers manager Pat Murphy, after last night's ugly 6-0 loss. "That kind of stuff emotionally can affect guys. They can start to play a little too hard."
For the last two games, I have been waiting for the Brewers to finish off the Cubs, so that I could issue a retort to Barry's irresponsible and biased claim that October is for vulgar baseball ogres. The Brewers, precise and zippy, do not have Big Boys. Through 164 games, it was possible to declare with full voice that they don't require Big Boys. Hell, the math tended to support the case that the Brewers haven't needed to hit the ball hard, or to swing very violently, or even really to make contact with the business ends of their bats. Good plate discipline, bat-to-ball skills, speed on the basepaths, and a team-wide knack for opportunism would do for these devious baseball gremlins what other hulking, blunt-ended squads get from true-outcome stuff. If precision is considered wrong in today's game, then screw today's game, but also let the NL's indefatigable top seed stand as a breathing refutation! And nanny-nanny-boo-boo to the grotesque brutes lying dead along their path to glory!
But after four games of this NLDS, I'm afraid it's time to wonder if the Brewers might die from a lack of beef. They survived and thrived through a dingerless Game 1, fueling my sense of impending moral triumph. They whacked a few strong homers in Game 2, sure, but not so many that their fundamental identity as champion of the puny arts was threatened. For 18 innings in Chicago, it has now felt like the Brewers require complex swirling wind patterns, one-off gravitational anomalies, and possibly the direct intervention of a sorcerer in order to score runs in bunches. The downright spooky proficiency they showed in the regular season at moving baserunners home seems increasingly both lightly fraudulent and also long gone. Inclined as I may be to credit Murphy's assessment of the influence of a noisy home crowd, it shouldn't be the difference between a team playing like world-beaters and playing like the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Brewers today seem distinctly iron-deficient. All those highway-speed flares and hopeful grounders lose their charm in a hurry when they are not finding outfield grass with bizarre frequency.
Teams that take a 2-0 lead in a five-game series, per MLB, have advanced about 89 percent of the time. In the present divisional format, the rate increases to better than 91 percent. The Brewers appeared to be comprehensively superior to the Cubs through two games, but after Wednesday's nail-biter and Thursday's massacre it becomes hard to ignore that Chicago won the season series, including three of their final four matchups. Adding to the distress, Murphy appears to be lining up another bullpen game for Saturday's Game 5, and with Milwaukee's relievers already having been heavily exposed.
"Hopefully the tables will turn when we get into Game 5 at our place,” said Murphy on Thursday. "I have faith in our team. I think this had to happen this way." I'm worried that Murphy is right, that what has happened to Milwaukee in this series had to happen, because there was no other way for it to happen, because the Brewers finally lack the raw, rippling shoulder meat to have produced any other outcome. The playoffs are more fun when the Brewers are out there zipping around; the problem, for them and their admirers, is what happens when they run out of zip.
