Once again, the Dodgers clash with the Milwaukee Brewers in the National League Championship Series. Both teams were rested with comparable levels of health, and the end result of Game 1 was a 2-1 decision. Except this year, we’re not discussing Blake Snell’s dominant Game 1 performance or how Blake Treinen miraculously didn’t blow the save.
If you saw the warts of the 2026 Dodgers this year, a lot of them were on display last night without belaboring the point. The kicker is that the plan to wear
down Brewers’ ace Jacob Misiorowski largely worked, sans the knockout punch.
Last year, I was fairly confident about the Dodgers’ chances in the NLCS. I would not have predicted a sweep, but it’s fair to conclude that those who predicted a tight, contested series in 2025 were not paying attention.
This year the consensus in punditry seems to be that we are on a collision course to a Milwaukee/Tampa World Series. It’s a hipster’s choice to be sure, considering that in that pairing, someone will be winning a World Series for the first time.
The fact that such a pairing would be a clash of less-than-average league payrolls is something that the owners would be doing their level best to ignore loudly in their dogged pursuit of a hard salary cap, but collective bargaining discussions are for another day.
Once again, the Dodgers are the bad guys of the NLCS and are trying to avoid the fate of Apollo Creed in Rocky II.
Personally, I still think we’re due to relive 2020 with the Dodgers and Rays, sans everyone living in quarantine at Globe Life Field. Personally, both fields are rather underwhelming. It’ll just take six games to get there.
Although now that the ALCS is set, Tampa should win in a walk. But a Dodgers/Cleveland Guardians World Series would be nothing less than a diabolical baseball summary execution of the Guardians.
The sports’ tiniest payroll versus the Dodgers? Comedies have been achieved with more believable scripts. It’s like making David fight Goliath without the sling.
If last night felt like a must-win (as Game 1s go), it felt more like a necessity for Milwaukee to finally best the Dodgers in postseason play, especially given the state of both rotations. This observation is due to the multiple emails I have received from the Brewers about the “tone-setting win.”
I chuckled.
Now the onus is on the Dodgers in Game 2 to do something that they haven’t been asked to do much so far this year: prevent themselves from going behind the figurative eight-ball.
If Game 1’s starting pitching matchup was the truest form of a toss-up, one would expect the Dodgers to have a nominal edge for the next couple of games, starting in Game 2 with Yoshinobu Yamamoto set to square off with Logan Henderson.
This observation is provided the team provides at least three runs of support, which is not a given. A nominal guess at what the pitching matchups would look like for the rest of this series is listed below.
- Game 3 (LA): Blake Snell vs. Robert Gasser
- Game 4 (LA): Tyler Glasnow vs. Dustin May
- Game 5, if necessary (LA): Misiorowski vs. Skubal
- Game 6, if necessary (MKE): Yamamoto vs. Henderson
- Game 7, if necessary (MKE): Snell/Johnny Wholestaff vs. May/Johnny Wholestaff
To prevail in a seven-game series, the Brewers are going to have to win four times in a series where Tarik Skubal and Yoshinobu Yamamoto are likely to pitch at least twice, which is a tall order on paper, to be sure.
Milwaukee is one quarter of the way there, and games aren’t played on paper. Also, two of the Dodgers’ aces (Snell and Glasnow) have played more like jacks so far this October. I dabble in poker, and the hand that often gets me in the most trouble is aces over jacks, because I frequently underestimate the strength of opposing players’ hands.
Considering I declined to travel to Milwaukee, in part because Bernie’s Slide is closed for the offseason, now is as good a time as any to dig a little deeper into a fleeting moment from the broadcast of Game 1.
This series was potentially decided on August 2
While it’s not ideal to be down 0-1, it’s borderline catastrophic to go down 0-2 in a best-of-seven series. Since the start of LCS play, teams that go up 2-0 have prevailed 79 out of 95 times. The last time a team was able to dig themselves out of an 0-2 hole was last year, when the 2025 Toronto Blue Jays dropped the first two games against the Seattle Mariners.
The Blue Jays clawed all the way back to clutch victory from the confused jaws of defeat by winning in seven games. The victory partly arose through clutch hitting and partly through managerial blunders from Seattle that really should have led to a pink slip then, rather than a year later after a wasted year.
If Los Angeles can snag home field from Milwaukee, it has one more opportunity today, and there’s probably no better pitcher on the mound to try to snare that outcome than Yamamoto.
Still, there was a hypothetical briefly alluded to in the broadcast by Joe Davis: what if the Brewers had ended up with Tarik Skubal instead of the Dodgers? Considering the Detroit Tigers wanted young pitching, let us presume that Logan Henderson went to Detroit instead of River Ryan from the Dodgers, and everything else (results, schedule, injuries, etc.) remained equal.
Under this scenario, odds are we’d have something like below:
- Game 1 (MKE): Blake Snell vs. Tarik Skubal
- Game 2 (MKE): Yoshinobu Yamamoto vs. Jacob Misiorowski
- Game 3 (LA): Tyler Glasnow vs. Robert Gasser
- Game 4 (LA): Justin Wrobleski vs. Dustin May
- Game 5, if necessary (LA): Snell vs. Skubal
- Game 6, if necessary (MKE): Yamamoto vs. Misiorowski
- Game 7, if necessary (MKE): Glasnow/Johnny Wholestaff vs. May/Johnny Wholestaff
Yikes. It’s as the saying goes: it can always get worse.
Personally, I would have used Emmet Sheehan in Game 4, but he’s not on the roster, so I’m not going to cheat him in. If one were looking for a silver lining from last night, because moral victories are the refuge of lesser clubs, it’s that the worst-case scenario was likely averted on August 2.
The Dodgers getting Tarik Skubal preserved the status quo; the Brewers ending up with Skubal likely changes the game, regardless of the overreacting from Fabian Ardaya of The Athletic:
What’s done is done, and Skubal landing in Los Angeles was supposed to maintain the clear gap between the two National League powers. Except that gap might no longer exist, not after the Brewers won every margin to take the opener of this National League Championship Series, 2-1.
“We didn’t necessarily expect a sweep,” Kiké Hernández said. “It’s gonna be a good series.”
The decisive blow? A taste of “Brewer Ball” — a walk, a bunt and a knock. The go-ahead single came from Luis Lara, one of the promising young players Milwaukee didn’t trade for Skubal. He hit a Skubal changeup back up the middle to make it 2-1 in the fifth.
“It’s kind of what we envisioned the series was going to be,” Freddie Freeman said.
Skubal landing in Los Angeles was to fill the gap left by Shohei Ohtani in the rotation due to injury. As it stands, Ohtani threw his most consequential innings in Houston and San Francisco in May. How badly do you think the front office wants a do-over with the benefit of hindsight?
It’s a moot point. Either these Dodgers find a way to play their way, or the second title defense ends in the next week, simple as that. Once again, Mr. Ardaya:
“[The Brewers are] a good baseball team; they do that type of stuff,” Skubal said.
This is what Milwaukee does. The Dodgers are still searching for their own formula.
“We should play Dodger baseball,” Betts said. “Whatever Dodger baseball is, that’s what we should do. We should not try to play Milwaukee Brewers baseball.” …
…The only way to stifle Milwaukee, Roberts said this week, is to play from ahead.
“How do you combat that?” Roberts said. “You try to get them to play from behind, to get them out of their game.”
The Dodgers led all but one inning of last year’s NLCS. They led for just two innings on Sunday.
[Emphasis added.]
As rallying cries go, I have heard better, much better. But the Dodgers can let their play do the talking starting this afternoon.
