Is this finally the year the Brewers exorcise their playoff demons and advance past the Dodgers on the Senior Circuit side of the bracket? Alongside LA, Milwaukee has been the class of the NL regular season for the last decade. However, they have never beaten their postseason final boss during this era, getting eliminated by the Dodgers in seven games in the instant classic 2018 NLCS before getting swept in the 2020 NL Wild Card Series and 2025 NLCS.
That finally looks set to change, the Brewers taking
a commanding 3-0 lead in the series on a brilliant start from Robert Gasser and home runs from Jackson Chourio, Jake Bauers, and Garrett Mitchell. With one more win, they’ll not only avenge those losses, but also win their first pennant in 44 years, when Harvey’s Wallbangers led the 1982 Brewers to the AL flag. Only the Pirates and Mariners have waited longer for a World Series berth. Could this be the year at last for dreams of a first Brewers championship to truly ignite?
They have one more win to go. Here’s how they got to the doorstep.
NLCS Game 3
Milwaukee Brewers 5, Los Angeles Dodgers 2
(Milwaukee leads, 3-0)
There is no better start to the game as a visiting team than a leadoff home run to put the home starter and crowd immediately on the back foot. Chourio said “hold my beer” as he homered on the first pitch of Game 3, ambushing a center-cut four-seamer from Blake Snell and lining it oppo just over the wall in right-center to instantly deflate a raucous crowd at Chavez Ravine who had been desperate to energize their wounded Dodgers. It is already the third postseason leadoff home run in the young career of the Brewers’ star left fielder, Chourio the hero of the NLDS against the Padres with six RBIs in four games.
Gasser typifies a Milwaukee Brewers player — a gamer with plenty of talent but not a name a baseball fan outside of Wisconsin is likely to recognize. He was part of the 2022 deadline trade that sent Josh Hader to San Diego. He debuted in 2024 but missed most of that and the next season to Tommy John surgery. He spent the first month-and-a-half of 2026 at Triple-A but didn’t look back after a mid-May call-up, starting 20 games and posting a 5-5 record, 3.87 ERA, 4.23 FIP, 103 strikeouts and 1.5 fWAR in 109.1 innings.
With the Brewers unsettled on their postseason rotation plans, Gasser allowed one or fewer runs in his final four starts of the regular season to cement his starting role in the playoffs. The 27-year-old lefty held the Padres to a run on three hits in four innings of Game 4 of the NLDS as the Brewers punched their ticket to the next round. Against this backdrop of hitting his stride once the games really started to matter, Gasser pitched possibly the best start of his life last night.
He’s not going to blow you away with velocity, but the unique way he hides the ball until the last moment of his delivery let his mid-90s sinker play up in LA. The Dodgers had no answer for the pitch as Gasser was able to paint both sides of the plate, getting the ball by the dangerous hitters in their lineup as if they collectively were not ready to hit the fastball.
Gasser waltzed through five scoreless innings allowing just three hits and a walk, but cameras curiously spotted handshakes in the dugout between the fifth and sixth innings. Gasser hadn’t had to make a stressful pitch all game and seemed to have plenty in the tank at just 72 pitches, but trainers did appear to be tending to a blister on the ring finger of his pitching hand. Practically every button that Brewers manager Pat Murphy has pushed this season and postseason has worked, seeing the team pace MLB with 103 wins and easily brush aside the Padres in the NLDS before taking a 2-0 lead over the two-time reigning champions, but this one blew up in his face.
Whatever the case, Murphy called on Abner Uribe for the sixth inning and it backfired spectacularly. He walked Teoscar Hernández, Kyle Tucker, and Shohei Ohtani (batting a rare sixth amid his awful slump) to load the bases with one out. Despite a pair of relievers hot in the Milwaukee bullpen, Murphy allowed Uribe to face the struggling Will Smith — 1-for-23 in six games this postseason. Smith ambushed a first pitch sinker right down the pipe, the deep fly ball clanging halfway up the wall in left-center to plate a pair and give the Dodgers their first lead of the series, 2-1.
Murphy belatedly called on flame throwing lefty DL Hall to clean up Uribe’s mess, and he struck out Kiké Hernández and Tommy Edman to strand runners on second and third and limit the damage to the two runs.
Murphy was perhaps vindicated in lifting his starter earlier than it seemed necessary, because we witnessed the flip side of that debate two innings later. It is perhaps fitting that Snell was the starter opposite Gasser in this game —the Rays’ Kevin Cash memorably removed Snell in the sixth inning of Game 6 of the 2020 World Series against the Dodgers despite Snell having struck out nine and not allowed a run on just 73 pitches — Gasser removed with his pitch count at 72.
After the Chourio leadoff blast, Snell was untouchable for six innings, allowing one hit and one walk while striking out nine as his four-seamer had some extra juice en route to racking up a gaudy 46-percent whiff rate. Dave Roberts allowed his dominating starter to come back out for the seventh, and it is amazing how the tide turned in an instant. He issued a leadoff walk to Andrew Vaughn, but with two lefties due up in Bauers and Mitchell, Roberts stuck with his southpaw starter.
The fatigue was apparent against Bauers, Snell’s misses occurring over the heart of the plate instead of outside of the zone, and the Brewers’ regular season home run leader won the monumental 11-pitch battle by blasting a middle-middle full count four-seamer 412 feet to right to put the Brewers back on top, 3-2. Mitchell then jumped on a 1-0 mistake changeup right down the middle, going back-to-back with Bauers to almost the exact same spot of the ballpark.
It was the first time in Snell’s entire career that he had allowed back-to-back homers to lefties and just the second time that he’d ever allowed two lefty-hitter homers in the same game (let alone inning). He’d allowed one lefty-hitter homer since Juan Soto took him deep for the Yankees in June 2024 in San Francisco.
That fully sucked all of the air out of Dodger Stadium, and the team nor their fans could will the comeback. Milwaukee added a pair of valuable insurance runs in the eighth and ninth. Brice Turang and William Contreras reached in the eighth on consecutive one-out singles to put runners on the corners where a Justin Wrobleski wild pitch allowed Turang to score the Brewers’ fifth run. Rookie Cooper Pratt lined a one-out single in the ninth, stole second, and scored on a Joey Ortiz single to make it 6-2. Hall and closer Trevor Megill combined to pitch a scoreless final 3.2 innings to seal the win and put the Brewers on the brink of sweeping the champions of the last two seasons.
Game 4 is tomorrow with first pitch scheduled for 8:00 pm ET. Tyler Glasnow will look to keep the Dodgers’ season alive while Milwaukee has yet to name a starter. The Brewers now have four chances to clinch the series and advance to the Fall Classic, where they will look to win their first ever title as one of five teams to have never won a ring. No expansion team has waited longer. It may finally be the Brew Crew’s year.
