Friday night’s ALDS game between the Mariners and Tigers felt like something classic, timeless even, as two teams desperately tried to score a single run for inning after inning after inning.
Saturday’s NLDS game between the Brewers and Cubs, meanwhile, felt entirely modern, just so 2025 in every way.
Both teams started openers. The Brewers went with their season’s closer, Trevor Megill, in the first inning rather than the ninth. The Cubs went with 36-year-old Drew Pomerantz, who triumphantly returned to the big leagues this year as a middle reliever after a three-year odyssey following his torn flexor tendon way back in 2021.
Morris and Smoltz, it ain’t.
But there was a very specific strategy involved — both teams wanted to score first. The win percentage of teams scoring first is always good for all the obvious reasons, but it feels particularly useful in a winner-take-all game. The Cubs had scored in the first inning in each of the first four games, the Brewers had scored in the first inning in three of those games, and with no great starting pitching options, the teams decided to go with a one-inning pitcher to get through that haunted inning.
Megill was able to do it — he threw a perfect first inning, striking out Kyle Tucker to finish it off. After the Tucker strikeout, he raised his arms and shouted, “Let’s Go!” and he stomped proudly toward the dugout. That’s how important the first inning was to the Brewers.
Pomeranz, meanwhile, could not escape the first. He got his fastball up to William Contreras, who pounded it over the left-centerfield wall for a home run. That’s 1-0. That’s the early lead.
That lead lasted about 83 seconds because in the top of the second, Seiya Suzuki poked Jacob Misioriowski’s 101-mph fastball over the right field wall. That’s 1-1.
In the fourth, Milwaukee’s Andrew Vaughn, who is a living example of how much better life can be after you’ve escaped the Chicago White Sox, connected with a Colin Rea cutter and sent it over the soaring glove of Cubs’ leftfielder Ian Happ. That’s 2-1.
In the seventh, with Brewers fans feeling so close to glory, the perfect Brewer Brice Turang — a fantastic player absolutely nobody outside the 414 area code knows — destroyed Andrew Kittredge’s slider for a no-doubt homer over the centerfield wall. That’s 3-1.
And that was the whole game.
I don’t just mean that was all the scoring. I mean, that was all that happened. The Cubs never got a runner to third base. The Brewers only did once. The 11 pitchers in the game allowed just six hits other than those four solo homers, none for extra bases. Each team was just 0-for-3 with runners in scoring position.
After such a cinematic game on Friday, this one felt like a bit of a letdown. I mean, certainly not to Brewers fans — they’re going to the Championship Series for just the fourth time in their history, and the dream of a first World Series triumph is still very much in the air. The inescapable Dodgers come to Milwaukee starting Monday, and Brewers fans can draw some small comfort from the fact that they beat the Dodgers all six times that the teams played this year. The Dodgers are healthy now, though. And the $218 million difference in the teams’ payrolls seems like a lot.
But it’s baseball, and there’s no way to guess what’s next. One thing to say, though, is that hits don’t come easy in October, and there’s a decent chance that the team hitting the most solo shots will win.
📓 This is Joe’s Notebook.
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