The Milwaukee Brewers are looking to bounce back today after an agonizing defeat at the hands of Blake Snell and the Los Angeles Dodgers in game one of the National League Championship Series. After Snell dominated
the Brewers for eight innings in one of the best starts in modern postseason history, the Brewers came tantalizingly close to escaping with a win but couldn’t quite finish a ninth-inning rally and fell 2-1.
Today, Milwaukee will turn to its ace, Freddy Peralta, to try to keep them out of a 2-0 hole before the series shifts to Los Angeles on Thursday.
Peralta had, by most measures, his best regular season in 2025, as he led the National League with 17 wins, made 33 starts, and pitched to a career-best 2.70 ERA while striking out over 200 batters for the third time in his career. That regular season included two victories over the Dodgers: one on July 7th, when he was fantastic, allowing no runs on five hits and only one walk in six innings, and the other a couple weeks later, on July 19th, when he wasn’t great—four runs in five innings—but picked up the win anyway as the Brewers picked up an 8-7 victory.
In the NLDS, Peralta pitched twice, in games one and four. He was solid if unspectacular in game one, a game which the Brewers led comfortably in for most of the afternoon, but he struggled a bit in game four in Chicago, when he needed 84 pitches to get through four innings and allowed four runs on three hits and two walks. He pitches today in a game that his team badly needs, and Milwaukee will be looking to its ace to live up to that billing.
A night after being subjected to the near-perfect Snell, the Brewers will face another ace-level pitcher in Yoshinobu Yamamoto. He was the one constant in Los Angeles’s starting rotation this season and made eight more starts than any other player on the team, with 30. In those 30 starts, Yamamoto was 12-8 with a 2.49 ERA (167 ERA+) and 2.94 FIP, and he led baseball with just 5.9 hits allowed per nine innings. Yamamoto also struck out more than 200 batters, made the All-Star team, and will almost certainly finish in the top five in NL Cy Young voting.
The Brewers, though, feasted on Yamamoto the one time they saw him this season. In that same July 7th game which Peralta pitched so well in, the Brewers chased Yamamoto in the first inning; he threw 41 pitches and allowed four hits and two walks, was pulled before he could get the third out, and got five runs (three earned) on his ledger. By Game Score, it was his worst start of the season, and the Brewers will do their best to recreate it. Like Peralta, Yamamoto has two starts this postseason and was good in one of them (he pitched 6 2/3 innings with nine strikeouts, walked two, and allowed two unearned runs on four hits against the Reds on October 1) and not so good in the other (he took a loss in game three of the NLDS against the Phillies, a game in which he allowed three runs on six hits and a walk in four innings).
The notable change to Milwaukee’s lineup tonight is, with the right-handed Yamamoto on the mound, the inclusion of Jake Bauers, who will play left field. That moves Isaac Collins to the bench, and Sal Frelick will again start the game in center. Brice Turang and Christian Yelich have also flip-flopped in the lineup, with Turang batting second and Yelich fourth. There are no changes to the Dodgers’ personnel, though the batting order has been rejiggered with the right-handed Peralta on the mound instead of yesterday’s left-handed opener, Aaron Ashby.
First pitch is at 7:08 p.m. on TBS and HBO Max, and you can hear the game on the Brewers Radio Network.
