Brewers Video
The Brewers pieced together nine innings of two-run baseball from their pitching staff against a vaunted Los Angeles Dodgers lineup in Game 1 of the NLCS, but the hurler on the other side rendered that effort moot. Blake Snell dismantled Milwaukee hitters one by one for most of the night, facing the minimum over eight shutout innings.
“I think it’s the most dominant performance against us [this season],” Pat Murphy said. It was an assessment shared by the bulk guy who worked (for part of the proceedings) opposite Snell.
“Incredible,” Quinn Priester said. “He’s won two Cy Youngs for a reason.”
Snell breezed through their lineup of woodpeckers with striking efficiency. It was just the third time all year that a starting pitcher completed eight innings against the Brewers. That’s a reflection of their offensive identity, which makes it challenging for opposing starters to work deep into games.
Even when a pitcher’s stuff and execution make him tough to hit on a given day, the Brewers still do everything they can to grind him down, inflating his pitch count to force an earlier exit. They refuse to chase pitches outside the zone; work deep counts; and put strikes in play when they do swing. Milwaukee’s offense finished the regular season with the lowest chase rate and third-highest contact rate in baseball. They chased an opposing starter from the game within five or fewer innings 88 times; only two teams did it more.
Snell gave them no opportunities to do that to him, reducing the Brewers to a lineup that bore no resemblance to the group that inflicted death by paper cuts on countless pitchers throughout the season. They whiffed 22 times out of 49 swings. They chased 33% of his out-of-zone pitches. Only 10 at-bats exceeded four pitches, allowing Snell to record 24 outs on just 103 pitches.
“His breaking ball was so good, he could flip it in there for a strike and then have the one below [the zone],” Murphy said. “It was really hard to discern, and the changeup was dominant to right-handers. So it was really, really difficult to get a bead on it.
“We couldn’t get anything going. Those pitches are really hard to bunt. They’re really hard to put in play.”
His hitters had the same praise to share, and the same dearth of real answers.
“We faced one of the best pitchers in the game,” Christian Yelich said. “He was on. When he’s executing like that, it’s going to be a tough night. We’ve got a lot of young guys in here, a lot of these guys’ first time facing him.”
Snell and catcher Will Smith seemed to anticipate that Brewers hitters would try to get on top of his signature riding four-seamer, so they flipped the script on them, using his changeup 37% of the time, the second-highest rate of any outing of his career. It coaxed 14 of those whiffs out of 23 swings, and all five balls in play against it were groundouts. Even that undersells how hard he leaned away from the heat. To righty batters, he threw 35 changeups, nine curveballs and four sliders, against just 14 fastballs. If the Crew were trying to find a fastball to hit, Snell couldn’t have confounded their approach much more completely.
“I think it’s just understanding what they were trying to do,” Snell said. “I pitch off what they’re telling me. So I just felt like they were really aggressive to a certain pitch, and it seemed to be that way, so I threw differently.”
Murphy has long admired the man who served as Snell’s catcher, and noticed the way he called the game for his star lefty.
“Will Smith, the way he called the game, it was unusual the way he did it,” Murphy said. “He didn’t go back and forth, back and forth. He went changeup, changeup, changeup. The ball was moving so much. It was such a great pitch.”
The moment Snell left the game, the Brewers reverted to their usual form. They drew three walks and saw 33 pitches in the ninth inning against Roki Sasaki and Blake Treinen, putting the tying run in scoring position before Brice Turang struck out to secure Game 1 for the Dodgers.
Ultimately, it was too little, too late. The positive takeaway is that the Dodgers bullpen remains vulnerable, and Milwaukee’s approach can amplify and exploit that weakness. They must get into that bullpen sooner, though, which means forcing Snell and the other three high-powered starters they’ll face in the series to work for each out.