Some nights in October, a series stops being a chess match and becomes a personality test. Game 2 of the National League Championship Series at American Family Field on Monday night was that kind of night, and William Contreras passed it three separate times. Milwaukee beat Los Angeles 7-4 to take a 2-0 lead in the NLCS, and almost every time the Dodgers pushed the game in their direction, the Brewers' catcher pushed it right back.
The full account from Reuters reads like a call-and-response. Los Angeles scored first. Contreras answered. Los Angeles rallied in the middle innings to lead 4-3. Contreras answered again, this time with the loudest swing of the night. Los Angeles tried to hold a one-run game together into the late innings. Contreras answered a third time, and after that the Brewers' bullpen simply stopped letting the Dodgers breathe.
Three Swings, Three Answers
Start in the first inning. The Dodgers struck early on a sacrifice fly from Teoscar Hernandez, the kind of clean, professional run that usually settles a road team into a big game. Contreras erased the lead almost immediately with an RBI single that tied the game 1-1, and the building understood the assignment for the rest of the evening: nothing Los Angeles built was going to be allowed to stand unchallenged for long.
Milwaukee moved in front in the third, and the rally told you plenty about why this Brewers team is so hard to shake. Jake Bauers ground through a 12-pitch, bases-loaded walk against Yoshinobu Yamamoto — at-bat of the night, apologies to everyone who actually swung — and Christian Yelich followed with a two-run single. Yelich finished with two RBI, and his single was the moment a good inning threatened to become a series-shifting one.
Because Yamamoto never recovered. The Dodgers' starter lasted just 2 2/3 innings, allowing three runs on four hits and two walks with one strikeout over 75 pitches. USA Today noted it was the shortest postseason outing of his career, and it looked it: Milwaukee fouled off pitches, extended counts, refused to chase, and treated the most expensive arm in the series like a problem to be solved by patience. That is not an accident. That is a game plan, executed in public.
The Dodgers' Weird, Scrappy Rally
And yet, somehow, Los Angeles led this game in the fifth inning — mostly because Milwaukee kept handing over runs in the strangest possible ways. Brewers starter Logan Henderson allowed four runs, only two of them earned, on three hits over four innings, and he committed two throwing errors that directly helped the Dodgers score. One Los Angeles run in the third came on Henderson's wild pickoff throw. In the fifth, an error on a Tommy Edman bunt helped set up a Freddie Freeman sacrifice fly that put the Dodgers ahead 4-3.
File that under things that cannot keep happening if Milwaukee wants to finish this series, because the Dodgers are not a team you donate extra outs to twice in a week and survive. But on Monday night, the mistakes became a footnote instead of the story, for one reason: the guy behind the plate refused to let them matter.
436 Feet of Answer
In the fifth, with the Dodgers up a run and the crowd suddenly doing math it did not enjoy, Contreras drove a solo home run to center field off Kris Bubic to tie the game 4-4. The local broadcast measurement making the rounds, via FOX6, put the ball at 436 feet — a no-doubt, straightaway-center shot in the biggest moment of the game to that point. Tie game, momentum restored, building shaking.
Then, the next inning, he did it again — quieter this time, and somehow crueler. Contreras singled home the go-ahead run to put Milwaukee in front 5-4, completing a three-hit, three-RBI night in which he personally accounted for a tying hit in the first, a tying homer in the fifth and the winning hit right after. USA Today also pointed out that the home run was the fifth postseason homer of Contreras' career, tying Jackson Chourio for the Brewers' franchise record. Chourio is the future in Milwaukee. Contreras, right now, is the present tense.
Fifteen Up, Fifteen Down
If Contreras won the game at the plate, the Brewers' bullpen won it by making the last five innings feel inevitable. Per Reuters, four Milwaukee relievers combined to retire all 15 batters they faced — not a hit, not a walk, not a courtesy baserunner to give the Dodgers' dugout something to talk about. JoJo Romero earned the win at 1-1 in the series' pitching lines with a perfect sixth inning, and Aaron Ashby closed it with 1 2/3 scoreless innings for his first career postseason save.
Read that split again, because it is the whole series in miniature: Milwaukee collected 12 hits; Los Angeles collected three. A Dodgers lineup built to overwhelm people managed three hits in a game it led in the fifth inning. The Brewers added insurance in the eighth — an RBI single from Brice Turang and another from Bauers to make it 7-4 — but by then the tack-on runs felt almost decorative. The door had already been slammed. The insurance just let everybody exhale.
Now It Gets Real for Los Angeles
Up 2-0, Milwaukee travels in the best possible position: two wins banked at home, a bullpen that just faced 15 batters and beat all 15, and a catcher authoring the series in real time. The series shifts to Los Angeles for Game 3 on Wednesday, October 14, and the pressure has changed addresses completely. The Dodgers need a win to keep this from becoming a countdown; the Brewers need two more, anywhere, anyhow.
There are things for Milwaukee to clean up — Henderson's throwing errors chief among them, because gifting the Dodgers runs is a debt that eventually comes due. But October series are rarely won by the team with the tidiest box score. They are won by the team whose best players keep answering, and by bullpens that turn the last 15 outs into a formality. On Monday night in Milwaukee, the Brewers were both of those teams at once.
Keep up with every pitch of the postseason on our Sports front, and catch up on today's other big games — including Warriors-Lakers in Las Vegas tonight and the Knicks' preseason loss to Minnesota — right here on Previously.
