MILWAUKEE — Mookie Betts slapped his bat with his free hand after tipping a slider from Brewers right-hander Abner Uribe back into catcher William Contreras’ mitt.
Betts had been setting the tone for the Dodgers from the leadoff spot all postseason, taking good at-bats against some of MLB’s best starting pitchers. But there wasn’t much he could do against a sinker-slider mix like Uribe’s.
Uribe shuffled off the mound, and the crowd at American Family Field roared.
Then, with left-handed-hitting Freddie Freeman coming to the plate, Milwaukee had an answer for him too. Manager Pat Murphy signaled to the bullpen, left-hander Aaron Ashby emerged and struck out Freeman on four pitches, only one of which touched the strike zone.
“They all throw 100 [mph] from different angles,” Freeman said after the Dodgers’ 7-4 loss in Game 2 of the National League Championship Series on Monday.
Those back-to-back strikeouts in the eighth inning were part of five perfect innings thrown by the Brewers’ bullpen — a postseason record. And the Dodgers’ inability to rally against the Brewers’ relievers, paired with the shortest start in Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s Dodgers career, sunk their chances of evening the series.
The NLCS heads to Los Angeles with the Brewers leading 2-0 in the best-of-seven series.
The Dodgers’ performance against the Brewers’ bullpen on Monday magnified how much the star-powered lineup hasn’t been clicking with Shohei Ohtani struggling at the plate. He went 0 for 4 in the cleanup spot in Game 2, bringing his postseason total to three hits, all singles, in 20 at-bats.
Manager Dave Roberts told the Athletic after the game that he would “have a conversation” with Ohtani on Tuesday to determine “what’s best for him, what’s best for [the team].”
Factoring into the decision of whether to bench Ohtani is an understanding that he likely is not completely healthy, according to a person with knowledge of the situation not authorized to speak publicly.
Ohtani has dealt with left knee and right biceps issues for much of the season. But it’s been difficult since he returned from the injured list to determine whether health, bad swing habits caused by earlier injuries, or some combination of the two has been to blame for his poor performance.
Ohtani hasn’t addressed the media since the day before Game 1 of the division series.
“It’s tough,” Teoscar Hernández said. “We obviously need his help. He’s a big, big part of this team, and it’s really important. And I feel bad for him. I know what he’s capable of. He’s been dealing with some stuff in the past. We don’t know if it’s still there. But it’s Shohei. Any moment he can come through.”
The game wasn’t doomed, per se, when Yamamoto exited after 2⅔ innings, but it was clear it would be an uphill battle for the Dodgers.
Yamamoto stood on the same mound where a year ago he’d thrown a complete game and was pummeled by Brewers fans’ chants:
“Yel-li! Yel-li!”
As the fans celebrated Brewers captain Christian Yelich’s two-run single for an early lead, Roberts emerged from the visiting dugout, ready to take the ball from the starter who’d made himself a household name with his postseason heroics.
“He just didn’t have it tonight, which is very rare,” Roberts said.
The two walks Yamamoto issued in the inning set up Yelich for a big at-bat. The first walk, to Brice Turang, included a borderline ball-four call. Yamamoto’s hand flew up to the back of his hat like he was contemplating an ABS challenge, but neither he nor catcher Will Smith pulled the trigger. And the second, to Jake Bauers, lasted 12 pitches.
The other run Yamamoto gave up, in the first inning, also included a missed opportunity for a challenge.
Yamamoto struck out Jackson Chourio — whose leadoff home run last year was the lone run in Yamamoto’s NLCS complete game — to open the frame.
Then Turang worked a full count — although the first ball caught most of the low and outside corner — before he hit an opposite-field double.
“It was kind of early in the game, we kind of had him on the ropes where we could just get him out there,” Smith said. “The walk one was a bummer but I guess it happens. It’s baseball.”
The next batter, William Contreras, fought off a low slider, poking it into shallow left field to tie the score.
Against Brewers starter Logan Henderson, the Dodgers capitalized on a couple of errant throws by the pitcher, on a pickoff attempt and a sacrifice bunt, to contribute to two unearned runs, on a day when he gave up four runs in all.
Hernández and Freeman hit sacrifice flies in the first and fifth innings, respectively. Freeman’s came off former Dodger Dustin May, driving in a runner inherited from Henderson. And that was the most the Dodgers accomplished against the same relief corps that held them off the day before. They finished with three hits, their fewest in a playoff game since 2020.
“If there is a positive, you can say that a lot of our guys are starting to get looks at their back-end guys,” third baseman Max Muncy said. “But when they’re as good as they are, I don’t know how much that helps. Unfortunately, that’s the issue with that.”
If the Dodgers are going to bounce back, they’ll either have to figure out how to score against the Brewers’ suffocating bullpen, or build early leads and maintain them.
The Dodgers were forced to throw seven relievers behind Yamamoto. In the fifth inning, with the Dodgers up 4-3, Roberts brought in left-hander Kris Bubic — replacing right-hander Roki Sasaki after a hitless inning — to face the left-handed-heavy heart of the order. But Bubic missed down the middle to the right-handed-hitting Contreras, who gave the fastball a ride over the center field wall, tying the score.
In the sixth, against Dodgers right-hander Brock Stewart, Contreras drove in the go-ahead run in a traffic-filled inning that included a Freeman error on a muffed pickoff attempt. Left-hander Tanner Scott came to the rescue and struck out Bauers and Yelich to end the inning and Garrett Mitchell to kick off the seventh.
The Brewers added insurance runs in the eighth inning with RBI singles by Turang off hard-throwing right-hander Edgardo Henriquez and Bauers against left-hander Justin Wrobleski.
“The guys in here are really good at staying together,” Betts said. “I don’t think there’s much doubt going on. I think we just need to regroup and figure out what we need to do individually. But there’s no doubt.”
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