By Jack Harris, Los Angeles Times
MILWAUKEE — The reason the Milwaukee Brewers are here in the National League Championship Series is because of plays like the one that ended the fourth inning Monday night.
A strange, one-in-a-million, 400-foot double-play in which one Brewers fielder made a spectacular defensive effort, and another never lost awareness of a wacky situation — highlighting the sound fundamentals that made them baseball’s winningest team this season.
The reason the Dodgers are here, however, is because of the way they can respond to adversity just like that — settling the panic with their dominant starting pitching, rallying at the plate with their star-studded lineup and suffocating an opponent with a record payroll’s worth of talent.
In a 2-1 Game 1 win of the NLCS at American Family Field, that was ultimately what made the difference.
The evening’s most memorable moment might have been that fourth-inning cluster, when the Dodgers had the bases loaded with one out, only to come up empty when Max Muncy had a potential grand slam robbed (but, crucially, not caught cleanly) and two Dodgers runners were retired on forceouts at home and third.
But, the most important contributions were what came after that, with Freddie Freeman’s home run in the sixth inning giving the Dodgers the lead, and Blake Snell’s scoreless eight-inning master class on the mound ensuring they wouldn’t relinquish it.
By the end, the former Giants left-hander Snell had become the real story.
Already this postseason, the team’s $182 million offseason signing had gotten off to a strong start in October, going at least six innings in each of his first two outings while allowing just two total runs.
But on Monday, the two-time Cy Young Award winner ascended to a different level.
Over eight innings of pure annihilation, Snell faced the minimum number of batters, erasing his only baserunner (which came on a flare single from Caleb Durbin to lead off the third) by picking him off later in the inning. He struck out 10 batters, setting a postseason career high. He needed just 103 pitches, with 69 going for strikes. And of those, 22 were on swing-and-misses, tied for the most any pitcher has generated off the contact-minded Brewers this season.
Since José Lima’s NL Division Series shutout in 2004, Clayton Kershaw had been the only other Dodgers starter with a scoreless eight-inning start in the postseason.
Every bit of Snell’s excellence was required, too — thanks, first and foremost, to the Dodgers’ squandered opportunity in the top of the fourth.
The inning had started well, with the lineup finally awakening. Teoscar Hernández led with a walk. One-out singles from Will Smith and former Stanford star Tommy Edman loaded the bases.
That brought Muncy to the plate, where the slugger got an elevated cutter from Brewers bulk man Quinn Priester, and clobbered a towering fly-ball to center field.
What followed, however, was a disaster. One both self-inflicted by the Dodgers’ lack of awareness, and created by the Brewers ability to do the little things so well.
As Muncy’s ball soared to the wall, Brewers center fielder Sal Frelick jumped, got a glove on it, and then — at least it seemed initially — caught it on a bobble. At third base, Hernández tagged up once, then again after seeing Frelick’s bobble, before finally breaking for home plate as the Brewers relayed the ball in.
What no one on the Dodgers noticed in the moment: Left field umpire Chad Fairchild waving his arms in the outfield, signaling (correctly, as replay would later show) that the ball had bounced off the top of the wall amid Frelick’s bobble. That meant, instead of a sacrifice fly situation, a force play was on for the defense.
Thus, when catcher William Contreras caught the throw home just ahead of Hernández’s slide, he was out even without a tag. And as the other Dodgers’ baserunners stood motionless on base — still thinking Frelick had cleanly made the catch — the ever-aware Contreras ran over to third himself and stepped on the bag, forcing out Smith after he had failed to advance from second.
The play would be reviewed, but the call would stand.
More frustration followed for the Dodgers, who got a leadoff double from Kiké Hernández in the fifth only to end the inning with another (albeit more traditional) double-play grounder from Mookie Betts.
And for a brief moment, the Dodgers seemed to be falling into the Brewers’ trap: Struggling with their talented pitching staff, frustrated by their stellar defense, and one mistake away from losing to a team with inferior talent but impeccable resolve.
Snell, however, never let that happen.
And then, with one out in the sixth, the Dodgers finally jumped ahead, when Freeman launched a high-arching drive to right that just kept carrying for his first home run of the playoffs.
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Snell retired his final 17 batters without hardly allowing even any hard contact. The Dodgers tacked on an insurance run when Betts drew a bases-loaded walk in the top of the ninth.
And, despite a supremely uncomfortable ninth inning in which Roki Sasaki allowed one run and Blake Treinen loaded the bases with two outs, the Dodgers held on — making the fourth-inning double-play no more than a footnote as they took a 1-0 lead in the series.
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