It’s Jake Bauerses All The Way Down

After a flyout and a strikeout in his first two attempts, Jake Bauers’s third time facing Blake Snell in Wednesday’s Game 3 of the National League Championship Series went like this: Bauers took a slider down the middle of the plate for strike one. He took two non-competitive pitches down low to make the count 2-1. He foul-tipped a changeup, and then, sitting on two strikes, four pitches into his at-bat, he decided that he simply would not strike out again.

So Bauers fouled off a slider in the zone, then a curveball. He laid off an inside fastball to draw the count full. Then he managed to foul off a high fastball, and, immediately after, slowed down to catch a changeup in the zone. As the pitch count for this at-bat ticked over into double digits, Bauers pulled a slider that sat up in the zone a bit too much, sending it into the stands past the right-field foul pole. On the 11th pitch, Bauers made no mistake. Snell threw a middle-middle, 98-mph fastball, and Bauers smoked a no-doubt, two-run homer that carried over 400 feet into right field to give the Milwaukee Brewers a 3-2 lead.

When Bauers’s teammate Garrett Mitchell hit his own home run off Snell just two pitches later, it was, comparatively, an anticlimax. Spiritually speaking, a guy hitting a home run one pitch after just missing out on another home run counts for two home runs. Bauers had already won the game; Mitchell’s own homer was just overkill on Snell’s way out.

Roll back to the half-inning before the Bauers homer, and things looked very different. Brewers pitcher Robert Gasser lived up to his surname and dueled well against Snell for five full innings, but when Abner Uribe took over for Gasser in the bottom of the sixth, his lack of command was obvious. He walked batters three and four in the Los Angeles Dodgers lineup, struck out batter five, and came up against batter six: an injured Shohei Ohtani. Ohtani, who had only three hits and three walks in 26 plate appearances up until that point in the series, walked to load the bases. Then Uribe came up against the seventh hitter in the lineup: Dodgers catcher Will Smith, who was having an even worse postseason than Ohtani. Smith hit a long, sharp double off a first-pitch, middle-middle sinker, driving in two runs and giving the Dodgers a 2-1 lead.

Even though Brewers manager Pat Murphy finally pulled Uribe for DL Hall, and despite the man named Dayton Lane striking out the next two batters to kill the rally, it felt very briefly like a turning point. Snell had struck out nine Milwaukee batters through six innings. Up until Uribe’s outing, the Brewers bullpen hadn’t allowed a single run. Here were the first cracks showing, exacerbated by Murphy’s slow reaction to Uribe’s obvious lack of his usual stuff on the day. If the Dodgers slump-ridden big guns could get going, a 2-1 series deficit could be perfectly surmountable; even without the offense, just think about Tyler Glasnow on the mound next, and the opportunity to get Tarik Skubal out there again, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto—unlikely to have two bad starts in a row—yet again. And then half an inning later, Jake Bauers happened, and took the wind right out of the Dodgers’ sails, just as the Brewers have done to their opponents this postseason, game after game after game.

The Brewers tacked on two more runs before the game’s conclusion, but with their bullpen switching right back to its postseason status of “unhittable,” all they ended up needing was the Bauers home run. Bauers had conducted an at-bat like that before in the previous game, against another Dodgers star starter in Yamamoto. The Brewers have a recent history of taking the allegedly unsustainable and converting it into a 100-or-so win regular season, and this year, they have managed to take that process with them through the postseason. That makes Bauers an apt encapsulation of their whole deal. Why not count on a guy who stuck with baseball for the health insurance stringing together two of the best at-bats of the postseason, in consecutive games, against consecutive great pitchers?

It doesn’t matter how good or menacing the Dodgers’ rotation is on paper. Skubal, Yamamoto, Snell—the Brewers have beat them all, paying back the same relentless inevitability with which the Dodgers demolished them last year. A team can pay for all those guys, and fans can marvel at the resultant absurdity (Will Smith batting seventh? Shohei Ohtani batting sixth?), but it’s postseason baseball, and it’s the Jake Bauerses with the 3-0 series lead.

Thursday night, the Dodgers will be fighting for their postseason life. And the Milwaukee Brewers, well—they just have to keep on walking.