The Best Series Since 1915 (and Three Others): MLB Postseason Check-In

The last time a postseason series went the way Brewers-Padres just did, Babe Ruth was still a Red Sox pitcher.

Four games. Neither team led by more than two runs at any point, which, per MLB, had happened in exactly one other postseason series of three or more games: the 1915 World Series. Three of the four were decided by a single run. That was some of the greatest baseball I’ve ever watched.

It started with the roof. Game 1, top of the ninth, Milwaukee up 3-2, a runner on, and Ty France lifted a fly ball toward left that clanged off a cable up in the roof at American Family Field. Jackson Chourio caught it on the way down. Out. San Diego challenged, the call stood, and the Padres lobbied for a rule change afterward. William Contreras, who was catching, said it might have broken a window.

I’m a Statcast guy, and I believe Statcast. Statcast had it at 105 mph with a 49-degree launch angle, which is a home run in one of the 30 big-league ballparks (Houston’s). It was not leaving that one. (Pat Murphy joked afterward that the late Bob Uecker swatted it down for Chourio, and I believe that even more than I believe Statcast.)

Then came Game 2. San Diego led 3-1 behind a strong Michael King start, Mason Miller set the Brewers down in order in the eighth, and the Padres were three outs from evening the series. Miller walked three in the ninth. With Milwaukee down to its last strike, Chourio lined a two-run single up the middle, and American Family Field lost its mind. What an amazing moment.

San Diego answered at Petco. Contreras homered, Jake Cronenworth answered with one of his own, and King, two days after starting Game 2, came out of the bullpen to pitch the last two innings and strand the tying run. Padres 4, Brewers 3. Great performance.

Then Milwaukee did what Milwaukee does in Game 4: constant pressure. Ten hits to San Diego’s three. Garrett Mitchell drove in a run, tripled to start the go-ahead inning, and robbed Manny Machado of a potential game-tying homer at the wall for good measure. Chourio’s single in that inning was his 17th postseason RBI, a franchise record. Brewers 3, Padres 1, and the series ended in four.

Honestly, even if San Diego had stolen Game 4, I don’t know how that Game 5 would have gone. The Padres were out of arms. King had started one game and closed another, and Walker Buehler was gone after three innings of an elimination game. But that’s neither here nor there.

Anyway, the Brewers won a franchise-record 103 games, the best record in baseball, so they host the Dodgers in a rematch of last year’s NLCS, and they get to start Jacob Misiorowski in Game 1 on Sunday. Miz led the majors in ERA (1.80) and strikeouts (252), he’s the Cy Young front-runner, and in 17 career innings against Los Angeles he has a 1.59 ERA. That’s going to be a really good series.

Atlanta never got going

On the other side of the bracket, I thought the Braves could make a run against the Dodgers. That was totally not the case. Two dominant pitching performances did it: Yoshinobu Yamamoto struck out 10 over seven innings of one-run ball in Game 3, and Tyler Glasnow and the bullpen held Atlanta to one run again in the clincher. The Braves scored eight runs in four games. Ronald Acuña Jr., playing through a sore knee, never got his bat going (3-for-21 this postseason heading into the final game), and the rest of the lineup didn’t either. Not that you can blame them with that Dodgers pitching. Outside of a 3-2 win in Game 2, it seemed like they were always playing from behind, and they never really gave themselves a chance.

The Bronx is going to be loud this winter

The Rays dominated the Yankees even more than the Dodgers dominated the Braves, and that is saying something. Tampa Bay swept them. New York hit .130 for the series, got one-hit in Game 1, made four errors in Game 2 and never led at any point in three games. What sucks is that the pitching was there; the staff held the Rays to 10 runs in three games. The bats were terrible.

And somehow Aaron Judge, out since Sept. 16 with a calf injury, couldn’t make it back for this series. That’s ridiculous.

There are going to be serious questions around that organization this offseason, and I would not be shocked to see heads roll. Some people will say it should be Aaron Boone; the fans were chanting it on the way out of Yankee Stadium. I don’t think it will be. A lot of the decisions aren’t entirely on Boone. This is a stats organization, and it hasn’t been the tightest ship.

That said, some of the managerial decisions have not been good. At all. With the season on the line in Game 3, Boone moved Ben Rice out of the leadoff spot he’d held in the first two games and batted Trent Grisham first. Boone said he wanted to create a little traffic in front of Rice. It didn’t. Grisham struck out to end the season.

The one that isn’t over

The White Sox have controlled their series with Cleveland. They won the first two in Cleveland, 3-0 behind a Munetaka Murakami homer and 4-3 behind a three-run sixth, and kept putting pressure on Cleveland’s pitching until it cracked. In Game 3 at Rate Field there was pressure, just not as much, and the Guardians’ bats finally got going: a Jo Adell three-run triple early, a José Ramírez two-run triple in the eighth, and a 9-3 Cleveland win. Good job by Cleveland to pull away at the end.

Chicago didn’t finish it out. Game 4 was Thursday at Rate Field, and the White Sox led 4-3 after five before the Guardians blew it open. Patrick Bailey and Ramírez homered in the fifth, and Cleveland scored six runs on 10 batters in the sixth to win 9-5. So it comes down to Game 5 on Saturday night at Progressive Field, 7 p.m. Central. Whoever wins gets Tampa Bay in the ALCS, and the White Sox are one win from their first ALCS since 2005. They lost the lead they built in the first two games, so now they get to find out what they’re made of.

If the NLCS is anything like Brewers-Padres, we won’t have to wait another 111 years to see the next one.