The Brewers Are Making the Dodgers Look Old, Tired and Vulnerable

Through two games of the NLCS, Milwaukee is thoroughly outplaying Los Angeles. A 12-pitch battle from Game 2 shows the difference between the teams.

Jake Bauers (right) worked Yoshinobu Yamamoto for a 12-pitch walk that changed Game 2. | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

MILWAUKEE — Everybody is busy. We get our news from TikTok, use emojis instead of words and punch up an app for dinner instead of firing up the stove burners. So, if you wanted to understand how the Brewers have won 108 games and how they are schooling the two-time defending champion Dodgers in the NLCS, all the time you needed to spare was seven minutes, 15 seconds.

Milwaukee first baseman Jake Bauers spent seven minutes, 15 seconds in the batter’s box against Dodgers righthander Yoshinobu Yamamoto, one of the premier clutch pitchers of this generation, in the third inning of NLCS Game 2 Monday. Bauers refused to go away. He defined Brewers baseball.

“I think there was a point during the at-bat where I just kind of... I decided that he wasn't going to get me,” Bauers said. “After that, I think it was more just blackout than anything.”

Bauers won the at-bat with a walk. The Brewers, down 2–1 at the time, won the game, 7–4.

“It changed the game,” Brewers manager Pat Murphy said. “That one at-bat flipped the whole game.”

Jake Bauers' 12-pitch walk against Yoshinobu Yamamoto is the most pitches any batter has seen in a plate appearance against Yamamoto in his career pic.twitter.com/rDCD0IWS9I

— Talkin' Baseball (@TalkinBaseball_) October 12, 2026

Yamamoto, exhausted and frazzled, never made it out of the inning. He dragged himself off the mound like someone tasked with solving the Sunday Times crossword puzzle while running a marathon. Uncle! Getting just eight outs forced manager Dave Roberts to use seven relievers behind his postseason ace, an unfathomable idea before the game.

The Dodgers are in trouble not just because they lost twice but because of how weary they looked. They had a lead with Tarik Skubal on the mound in Game 1 and a lead with Yamamoto on the mound in Game 2 and left Milwaukee down two games to none. They have never looked more vulnerable in their postseason runs over the past decade than they do now.

Shohei Ohtani is 3-for-20 this postseason with a dreadful .411 OPS and no extra-base hits. | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

Their problems are many. Los Angeles cannot hit the power sinkers of the Milwaukee bullpen. It is 2-for-29 (.069) against the Brewers’ pen.

Dodgers DH Shohei Ohtani is a shell of himself because he doesn’t have the lower half stability to hit off a firm front side. He can’t turn on a ball. The last time he pulled a ball for an extra base hit was Aug. 26. He is reduced to trying to flick the ball to the opposite field. The Brewers are attacking him with elevated heaters in the zone as if he were a No. 9 hitter. Ohtani is so compromised Roberts must think about sitting him for Josue De Paula—heresy, maybe, but the times are getting desperate.

The Dodgers look old. In two games, they have one extra base hit, no home runs, no stolen bases and one hit in 12 at-bats with runners in scoring position. Their only path to victory is to slug, and they are playing the team that depresses slug more than any other, especially with Murphy narrowing his bullpen use.

On top of all those issues, Roberts got burned in a rare postseason miscalculation. The game was tied in the sixth inning when reliever Brock Stewart gifted Milwaukee a rally. He walked No. 9 hitter David Hamilton, then threw away a pickoff attempt to advance Hamilton to second. Jackson Chourio moved him to third with a Brewer-perfect productive out.

Roberts had lefty Tanner Scott ready for the left-handed hitting Brice Turang. The high percentage move was to have Scott face Turang, walk William Contreras and then face Bauers, another lefty. The Dodgers’ path out of that inning was having Scott face two lefthanders.

Instead, Roberts left Stewart in the game. Roberts intentionally walked Turang to pitch to Contreras, which made little sense because the Dodgers before the series identified the red-hot Contreras as the name to circle on the lineup with the notation, “Don’t let him beat us.”

Brewers catcher William Contreras (left) is 9-for-23 with three home runs and a stellar 1.264 OPS in six postseason games. | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

Asked for an explanation, Roberts said, “It just felt like trying to put Contreras on the ground. I just felt that if we forgo Brice right there and then we have a chance to put him on the ground and get a double play ball ... Contreras didn't hit the ball hard. He flared it out to left field, drove in a run, and that's what they do.”

There’s a problem with that thinking. After Stewart put Turang on, Turang was going to steal second base. Max Muncy was playing Contreras deep at third base, nowhere near Hamilton, an elite runner at third who represented the tying run. As one Brewer said, “No way they’re throwing down [to second] there.” A stolen base would thwart a double play possibility.

It did not matter. One pitch was all it took for Contreras to foil Roberts’s strategy. Stewart hung a first-pitch sweeper in the zone. Contreras rapped it into left field for a tie-breaking single. No, it wasn’t hit hard (76.9 mph), but it was another example of a red-hot Contreras mastering situational hitting. 

William Contreras puts the Brewers in front!

He's got 3 RBI tonight 💪 pic.twitter.com/IHA682RpfR

— MLB (@MLB) October 12, 2026

He also knocked in the first run with a sawed-off, two-strike swing and tied the game in the fifth with a bases-empty, swing-from-the-heels moonshot for a homer. The Dodgers got beat by the one guy they didn’t want to let beat them, an opportunity the Brewers loved receiving.

“The way he's swinging it right now? For sure,” said Milwaukee hitting coach Dan Vogelbach. “I mean, these guys just love the moment. And William loves the moment about as much as you can love it. So, when he gets the chance, you always feel like he’s going to come through.”

Contreras won the game, but it was Bauers who changed it. Two years ago, Bauers was all but certain he was quitting baseball. It was no longer fun. He had bounced around seven organizations in 10 years and had just hit .199 for Milwaukee in a part-time role. His wife, Lauren, was going to return to teaching while Bauers would stay at home with their child. It was all set until Lauren announced she was pregnant. The need for health care coverage motivated Bauers to stay in baseball with the Brewers.

Bauers re-signed on a minor league contract and made the team. After hitting .235 in a part-time role, he changed his offseason training program last winter to emphasize balance and body control over strength. The changes helped him lose the drift in his swing and rotate around his core. A career .365 slugger, he broke out with a .484 slugging percentage.

“He's impressed me all year, to be honest,” Vogelbach says, “by just not getting sped up in big moments and trusting that he doesn't have to cheat to anything, and he just backs balls up, but he doesn't try to do too much ... He just believes in himself. He trusts himself and he's never sped up, which is really, really cool to see.”

Bauers added an RBI single in the eighth inning of Game 2. | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

Yamamoto tried everything he could to make Bauers go away. He threw five different pitch types: splitter (four of them), four-seamer (three), curveball (three), cutter (one) and sinker (one). At one point, with some help from his dugout, Yamamoto stopped the game because of an apparent Pitchcom issue to get a needed breather.

“I was like, ‘C’mon, really?’” Bauers says. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

With the count full, Bauers fouled off six straight pitches of five different pitch types.

“Honestly, I wasn't trying to cover everything,” Bauers said. “I was just trying to battle until I got one that I felt like I could handle. And it was just trying to spoil, spoil, spoil, and either I'll get one or he'll walk me.”

On the 12th pitch, a spent Yamamoto spiked a curveball in the dirt. Yamamoto had thrown 149 full-count pitches this year. Only 18 of them were curveballs. One of them was a ball to Bauers in August for ball four. This was the first time all year Yamamoto bounced a full-count curveball. He was spent.

“It felt great,” Bauers said. “Any time you can grind a guy down like that, it's not going to end up being a bad thing.”

The Brewers are 5–1 this postseason with every win coming out of the bullpen and four of them rally wins after falling behind.

“I think it's [the] approach,” Bauers said when asked how they can make comebacks look routine. “I think it's a team approach more than anything. We might not hit you out of the game every night, but we're going to make it hard. I think that's the goal: make it tough. When one through nine has bought into that, special things can happen.”

There was another moment Vogelbach appreciated as one that also defines Milwaukee team baseball. It occurred in the eighth inning with the Brewers clinging to a one-run lead. Hamilton was at first after leading off with a single. He took off on a steal attempt on the first pitch. Chourio saw him run and took a fastball down the middle to allow it.

“In fact, Jack may be the best fastball-hitting hitter in the big leagues,” Vogelbach said. “And he takes it to let him steal, and then he gets him over [with a groundball] and then the inning just goes, right?”

The Brewers tacked on two more runs. It was the first time in 54 innings the Brewers and their postseason opponent were separated by more than two runs.

“Tonight, there was so much team baseball, like little stuff that wins a game,” Vogelbach said. “It's like these guys just trust the guy behind them, and they fully believe in each other, and they're not intimidated.”

The Brewers clearly have been the better team. They have put more runners on base (30–19) and outhit the Dodgers (19–9) and outhomered them (2–0). They have truncated the outings of Skubal (five innings) and Yamamoto (2 2/3) to their career lows in 20 combined postseason starts. If it all sounds like too much to absorb, don’t worry. Understanding why the Brewers have the Dodgers in deep trouble takes only seven minutes, 15 seconds of your time.

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