The Milwaukee Brewers are one win from eliminating the two-time defending champion Los Angeles Dodgers, and in Chavez Ravine, nobody wants to say the word “sweep” out loud. Milwaukee has taken a 3-0 NLCS lead on the back of Wednesday’s 6-2 win at Dodger Stadium, and Los Angeles now has to win four straight just to survive elimination in its own building.
Everybody’s treating tonight like the moment this series finally turns. It didn’t turn — Milwaukee already won the regular-season series 4-3, and they’ve taken three straight in October on top of it. The reaction is just now catching up to the evidence that’s been sitting there since April.
Tyler Glasnow gets the ball for Game 4 tonight, and this is as close to a must-win start as it gets outside of a World Series. He’s the pitcher the Dodgers signed to a five-year, $136.5 million extension the same winter they locked up Shohei Ohtani, the two moves that were supposed to buy this roster a decade of championships.
Nobody drew up a decade that ends with a home sweep in Year 2.
That’s the part that should actually bother Dodgers fans more than one lost game. This isn’t a scrappy underdog running hot for a week. It’s the Dodgers outspending the entire final four and still losing the season series to a Milwaukee roster that doesn’t have a single $100 million contract on it.
The at-bat that actually cracked this series open came in the seventh inning of Game 3. Jake Bauers fouled off three straight two-strike pitches against Blake Snell, numbers eight, nine, and ten, before turning on pitch eleven and dropping it into the stands for a two-run homer. Snell’s groin gamble of staying in that long is the type of decision that looks fine right up until it very suddenly doesn’t.
None of this is some one-series fluke. Milwaukee’s lineup owns MLB’s best team batting average this season, top to bottom, and lineups that hit like that don’t go quiet just because the calendar flipped to October. My grandmother, who has an opinion on every batting order in baseball, called this a problem for LA back in June.
A Brewers sweep of the Dodgers in the NLCS would sting on its own. The fact that it would also be Milwaukee’s first World Series trip since 1982 — a 44-year wait older than most of this Dodgers roster — makes it worse.
Even the team’s own account couldn’t dress up how Wednesday night went.
https://twitter.com/Dodgers/status/2110569311878500402
That’s about as blunt as a front office social media account gets. Tonight it’s on Glasnow to make sure nobody has to post something worse.
Glasnow’s been good when his body cooperates, and the Dodgers bullpen is deep enough to bail out a shaky start if it comes to that. Elimination games have a way of waking up rosters that spent six months coasting on reputation alone.
Keep saying it’s too early to use the word sweep if you want.
Milwaukee’s bat has been saying something else since April.
