Brewers and Padres Complete Game of High Leverage Innings

The Brewers earned a victory over the Padres in Game 1 of the NLDS on Saturday. With this year’s presumptive Cy Young winner starting for the Brewers and the former Cy Young winner (and still an above-average starter) going to the Padres, the low-scoring event wasn’t a surprising outcome. However, the game doesn’t quite play out as expected. But the late-inning contest feels almost from the beginning, and with both emotions and the pressure index constantly running high, perhaps it is better to tell the story of Game 1 through the reactions that arose from one of the most important players in both dugouts – Milwaukee outfielder Sal Frelick.

Frelick was shown above contending with the unusual double play he initiated in last year’s NLCS, but he also applies a confused feeling to the experience of watching Brewers starter Jacob Misiorowski allow three consecutive hits in the second inning on Saturday. In half of Misiorowski’s 30 starts this season, he has allowed three or fewer hits in an entire outing, making three hits over three plate appearances enough to elude him. Trouble started with a one-out, infield single off the bat of shortstop Xander Bogaerts. The hit was a total of six light battles. Bogaerts called the first four pitches he saw (two of the team’s balls were called, while the others were called quadruple and dribblers). He fouled off a 2-2 fastball, then rolled a slide for a ball that forced shortstop Cooper Pratt to run far enough to his right that, during stoppage time, he couldn’t make a throw to beat Bogaerts at first.

Although Misiorowski has the type of batted ball that pitchers tend to like, the entire interaction with Bogaerts highlighted the problem with the Cubs in Milwaukee. For a fastball to function, hitters need to be able to power through it, and hitters need to be willing to deliver it, even when the touch is out of the zone. On the season, his four-seamer averaged a 40.2% whiff rate and a 34.3% catch rate. But on Saturday night, he was generating whiffs just 14.3% of the time and hitting hitters just 24.1% of the time. Bogaerts was content to watch three hot shots from The Miz and then get fouled in the fourth. As the San Diego Rams often clipped fastballs in the zone and pulled the pitcher when he left the zone, Misiorowski set his 96-mph curveball so that he could more reliably throw the pitch into the zone for a strike call to meet the Padres’ offensive linemen.