Milwaukee Brewers manager Pat Murphy had just watched his club sweep Los Angeles for a fourth straight National League Championship Series game. Standing with his team in the Dodger Stadium clubhouse, he was ready to celebrate. But before popping out to set up his famous stream of champagne and suds, Murphy had news.
“They took a bunch of Hall of Famers. We got a bunch of gamers.”
Advertisement
Murphy had pinned the Dodgers to the wall, a season of juggling that entered 2026, with eyes on becoming the first NL team to win three straight World Series titles.
He even nailed the postgame speech.
Related: Brilliant Brewers to first Series since 1982 as Dodgers blow 4-0 lead
The Dodgers were dead, and more importantly, Milwaukee made history by becoming the first team to draw the NLCS by returning the favor against the very same team, the very next season.
Making history, it seems, is the theme with these Brewers, who have a franchise-best 103 wins in a regular season, and have now pushed off a team that has become the first true baseball dynasty in the millennium.
Advertisement
Milwaukee has transformed LA into a ghost team, and no more so than in Game 4. When the losing Dodgers bid to wake up with a 4-0 lead, the Brewers were paying attention. And again, it was Jake Bauers who broke LA’s back. In Game 2, Bauers crushed Dodgers ace Yoshinobu Yamamoto with a heroic 12-pitch walk that sparked a key rally. In Game 3, he had a heroic 11-pitch at-bat, this time against two-time Cy Young Award winner Blake Snell, concluding with a franchise-defining home run. In the fourth inning of Game 4, Bauers hit a double to start Tyler Glasnow, cutting the Dodgers’ lead in half. An inning later, Bauers – a repeat infielder who delayed his retirement and returned this season because he needed health insurance to be a soon-to-be – drew a bases-loaded walk to tie the game. Garrett Mitchell’s sixth inning solo home run gave Milwaukee a lead that it maintained. Old school, three innings past Aaron Ashby was the chef’s kiss.
Now Milwaukee will be heading to their first Series since 1982. It will be time to cheer the Brew Crew, who are waiting for their American opponents, the Tampa Bay Rays or the Cleveland Guards. But first the funeral.
Tight, young, dynamic and basically the sound of the Brewers made Los Angeles look old, flat and incompetent. And while it seems somewhat sudden, perhaps the writing was on the wall all along.
default
Advertisement
The Dodgers, the team that has it all, are missing freebies and have more money than Davy Crockett, won 100 games this season, but were just 38-37 against teams over .500 and hit an MLB-worst 128 double plays. On the road, they looked more like another valuable but deeply flawed Maritime superpower: the New York Yankees. The Bronx Bombers have also beaten lesser opponents all season while struggling against higher end teams. It doesn’t happen that both teams are out now; Baseball is being pulled out of fashion, even on what some believe to be a “dirt shoot” on the Internet.
Perhaps the most offensive performance was the elimination of a prolific playmaker, Shohei Ohtani. The best two-way player in baseball, within his category of one, has shown signs of breaking out in the latter part of the season. At first he forced him to stop by putting injuries on him. Then from late August until Thursday he went as a fugitive. Ohtani said so much about his ability, not to hold back the injuries, but that he dropped to sixth in the batting order of the 3rd game, and that the elite player in his first did not happen unless there are questions. In the seventh inning of Game 4, with Kiké Hernández 90ft away from tying the game at five, Ohtani drove in an Ashby slide that was closer to Fresno than Dodger Stadium to home plate. Ohtani, a four-time MVP, wasn’t alone. MVP Mookie Betts struck first; former MVP Freddy Freeman had a lighter hit. The line, collectively, batted for a .590 OPS in the series, while being mostly uneven.
After the game, manager Dave Roberts, who had been Murphy’s favorite throughout the series, told Fox that “the great thing about what we do is you can try as much as you want, you want it so bad and you can’t do anything about it. Nothing is guaranteed.”
And this seems to go to the heart of where we are with the Dodgers, and where we are with the Foxes: nothing is guaranteed at all. I didn’t even sign Kyle Tucker and Edwin Díaz in the offseason for a combined $309m. Not even after trading Cy Young Award winner Tariq Skubal at the deadline. And not writing down the $340m price tag. The Dodgers’ salary is more than the combined salary of the Rays, Guardians and Brewers, the club that sent home “the team that destroyed baseball.”
Advertisement
So the Dodgers always leave us with the best in all questions. Probus: how will they respond and return? Bigger questions: Are the critics saying that baseball has been lost since the Brewers and their 19th payroll just destroyed them? Is baseball, a game that involves both skill and luck and always keeps us guessing, really some kind of utopian paradise where the poor can compete against the rich for prizes? Are the high-paying and all-star-laden rosters the most important metric when it comes to who can compete for the title? How much can smart, deliberate smart copper accomplish for small budgets? In other words: Who can find games that Hall of Famers can’t afford?