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The Brewers looked undeniable. The Guardians looked underrated. I’m Levi Weaver — welcome to The Windup!

Daniel Shirey / MLB Photos via Getty Images

Brewers 7, Dodgers 4: Milwaukee takes 2-0 lead

Two games in, and it already feels like there are too many NLCS storylines to fit into one newsletter. So let’s try to summarize last night’s 7-4 Brewers win.

The Milwaukee bullpen has been astonishing: Neither Jacob Misiorowski nor Logan Henderson made it out of the fifth innings of their starts.

No problem.

Brewers relievers threw five perfect innings last night, bringing their postseason line to 28 2/3 bullpen innings, and one earned run (0.31 ERA).

The trade-deadline narrative: I was among those who criticized the Brewers for not going all in at the deadline to get Tarik Skubal, opting instead to hold on to Henderson and acquire Dustin May and JoJo Romero.

I still think they’d be a better team with Skubal, but Henderson started their Game 2 win, and May and Romero have been lights-out in the bullpen. They might be good enough without him.

Skubal + Yama = 0 wins: Before yesterday, the Dodgers were 9-1 in Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s postseason starts. (He also had a pretty memorable relief appearance.) He averaged 6.03 innings per start in those 10 starts.

Last night, he only made it through 2 2/3 innings, allowing three runs on four hits. Perhaps he could have continued, if not for …

That Jake Bauers walk: Another thing Yamamoto had never done in three MLB seasons — regular season or playoffs — was throw more than 10 pitches in a plate appearance. In the bottom of the third, however, Bauers dug in and battled.

More than seven minutes later, on the 12th pitch of the plate appearance, the Brewers first baseman had earned a walk. Two pitches later, Christian Yelich singled home two runs to give Milwaukee a 3-2 lead and end Yamamoto’s night.

William Contreras is having his moment: He’s hitting .391 (1.264 OPS) with three home runs this postseason. I’ll let Tyler Kepner tell you more.

The Dodgers offense looks cooked: More on this below, but Shohei Ohtani is clearly hurting and may not be in the starting lineup for Game 3. Will Smith’s 1-for-19 slump is now a 1-for-23 slump. Two of L.A.’s four runs came on bad throws to first base (and the other two came on sac flies). They now have one extra-base hit (a Kyle Tucker double) and nine singles this series.

They haven’t been here before: The Dodgers haven’t trailed 2-0 in any series since 2023. But as unprecedented territory goes, that’s nothing compared to what Jayson Stark reports in today’s Weird & Wild: Namely, that the Brewers have never — in their entire franchise history — held a 2-0 lead in any best-of-seven playoff series.

All of that notwithstanding …

The series is now headed back to Los Angeles for three games. The Dodgers have rotation depth — two-time Cy Young winner Blake Snell and All-Star Tyler Glasnow — that Milwaukee does not. A 2-0 lead is certainly better than a 2-0 deficit for Milwaukee, but this series is not over yet.

Game 3: Tomorrow, 8 p.m. ET.
Probables: Brewers’ Robert Gasser vs. Dodgers’ Snell.

More from this series: The Dodgers opted not to challenge a few pitches, which might have cost them.

🤝 Ken’s Notebook: L.A. needs to sit Ohtani

Today, Ken Rosenthal takes a look at where the back-to-back Dodgers are after losing the first two games of the NLCS. Here’s an excerpt.

It’s not over. But if you were to picture the end of the Dodgers’ championship run, this is how it would look, no?

A physically compromised Ohtani bearing no resemblance to his usual MVP self. An offensively challenged lineup managing only one extra-base hit in two games. Co-aces Skubal and Yamamoto lasting a combined 7 2/3 innings in their two starts.

The Brewers look hungrier, more athletic and superior in the bullpen. Including playoffs, they’re now up to 108 wins.

It’s difficult to imagine the Dodgers taking four of the next five games, even with the next three at home. But considering how many escapes they pulled off while becoming two-time World Series champions, it’s also difficult to imagine them just fading away.

“We know what we can do. We know the team that we have,” left fielder Teoscar Hernández said. “There is still a lot of series to go. We know right now they’re playing really good baseball. They’re going to be tough to beat. But it’s not impossible.”

No, it’s not, but so much for the Dodgers needs to change.

Crazy as it sounds, the Dodgers need to sit Ohtani, whose at-bats could not be any worse, for rookie Josue De Paula. The idea is at least under consideration. Ohtani is 3-for-20 with no extra-base hits and three walks in the postseason. Manager Dave Roberts told The Athletic he will speak with Ohtani today and “try to figure out what’s best for him, what’s best for us.”

The answer should be obvious. Allowing Ohtani to continue like this would be unfair to both him and the team. Whether it is his left knee or right biceps, some combination of both, something else entirely, he clearly is not right. Batting him cleanup, as Roberts did the first two games of this best-of-seven series, disrupts the flow of the lineup, not that the flow would necessarily improve much without him.

The Dodgers have scored 19 runs in six postseason games. They’re batting .193 with a .263 on-base percentage and are 2-for-26 with runners in scoring position. Roberts moved up Hernández to the third spot Monday and dropped Will Smith to fifth. Smith went 0-for-4, falling to 1-for-23 for the postseason.

Two of the Dodgers’ runs scored on errors. Two scored on sacrifice flies. Roberts, in his postgame news conference, noted correctly that the Brewers saw far more pitches than the Dodgers, 172 to 125. Milwaukee’s total included a 12-pitch walk by Jake Bauers that led to a two-run single by Christian Yelich and Yamamoto’s removal after 2 2/3 innings.

The Brewers haven’t exactly been flawless, striking out 23 times in two games and getting sloppy defensively in Game 2. But they’ve still been the better team.

(For the rest, click here.)

Mary DeCicco / MLB Photos via Getty Images

Guardians 7, Rays 3: Not a mismatch after all?

As Zack Meisel points out in last night’s game recap, Cleveland’s offense really started to click around the beginning of September. I had chalked that up to them playing nine of their 25 September games against bottom-five pitching staffs (Twins, A’s, Royals).

And when they scored nine runs in Game 3 of the ALDS (and another nine runs in Game 4), I chalked that up to the White Sox pitching staff being cooked.

My bad.

I just wasn’t convinced Cleveland had flipped the “Engage 1999 mode” switch for October. Surely the Rays, fresh off suffocating the Yankees’ offense in the ALDS, would put them in their place, right?

For the first five innings, yes. From the sixth onward, absolutely not.

José Ramírez has shown up: Thanks largely to a hamate bone (hand) injury, Ramírez’s 2.6 bWAR this season was his worst in a full season since 2015, when he was 22 years old. He seems fine now; he’s hitting .348 (1.183 OPS) with two home runs this postseason.

Last night, his 3-for-5 included an eighth-inning infield single (later scoring the go-ahead run), and a ninth-inning RBI single, giving the Guardians an insurance run.

The Rays could have walked him in the ninth (there were two outs and first base was open), but that would mean pitching to …

Chase DeLauter, who looks like the answer: Wait, what was the question? Ah, right: Are the Guardians allowed to have more than one good power hitter? The rookie went 3-for-4, including a solo home run to lead off the sixth inning and get Cleveland on the scoreboard.

But the biggest hit of the night was …

Nathaniel Lowe’s game winner: The deadline acquisition drove in Ramírez and DeLauter in the eighth with a tie-breaking single. He wasn’t the only new guy to contribute; Patrick Bailey’s second home run this postseason tied the game in the seventh, and Jo Adell drove in the game’s final two runs with a double to put the game out of reach.

The Rays were set up perfectly to take a lead in this series: playing at home, ace on the mound, facing Foster Griffin (who is very good, but is neither Parker Messick nor Gavin Williams).

Now they’re down 1-0, and hoping star third baseman Junior Caminero is OK after this scary collision with Jonny DeLuca. There’s time for the Rays to recover, but postseason baseball is not a patient environment for righting ships: Things can get out of hand fast.

Game 2: Tonight, 8 p.m. ET.
Starting: Guardians’ Messick vs. Rays’ Freddy Peralta.

More from this series:

• For Lowe, this moment was a splash of joy in a year marked with grief. His mom, Wendy, died in March.
  
• Rays manager Kevin Cash once pulled Blake Snell too soon. This time, he may have waited too long to pull Drew Rasmussen.

Last week, Tim Britton and Sam Blum had a story on how local broadcasters handle calling a national broadcast without showing bias toward “their” team. Today, Britton tells us how national broadcasters prepare to call a series featuring a team they might not have seen often.

Most-clicked in our last Windup: Stark’s dive into the Misiorowski-Skubal matchup.

Handshakes and High Fives

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