CHICAGO — It was at this ballpark in late August that the Brewers’ zen master, Christian Yelich, urged calm. The Brewers were fresh off a franchise-record 14-game winning streak when they came to Wrigley Field to play five games over four days, and when they took the series opener from the Cubs, Milwaukee moved nine games up in the NL Central. Things were well under control.
But when the Cubs won the next three in a row, Yelich sensed tension out there in Brewerland. He urged calm, promised that no one within the four walls of the clubhouse was panicking, and made a prediction.
“We’re going to probably see them at some point during the postseason,” Yelich said, “and it’ll be a good series.”
Yes, these division rivals would see each other in the postseason. And yes, it is a very good series.
A better series than the Brewers had hoped.
After having this best-of-five NLDS well under control with victories in each of the two games in Milwaukee, leaving them one win shy of snapping a streak of six straight postseason series defeats, the Brewers lost for the second straight night in Game 4 on Thursday, 6-0, forcing a decisive Game 5 back at American Family Field on Saturday. The loss dropped Milwaukee to 3-10 all-time in potential clinching games in the postseason, which is the lowest winning percentage in potential series clinchers for any franchise.
“It’s part of the story, man,” Yelich said. “Sometimes you’re going to have to win some big games. You face some adversity in the postseason and you have to keep going. We played well at our own field, they took care of business here. We’ll go back and get ready for Saturday and make sure we play well.”
Cubs outfielder Pete Crow-Armstrong said: “We weren’t going to win the series yesterday. We weren’t going to win the series today. But just to give ourselves a fighting chance is all we were really trying to do. You kind of saw some of the better baseball we’ve played in this postseason.”
At stake is a date in the NLCS with the Dodgers, who won a wild, 11-inning walk-off in Los Angeles just as the Brewers and Cubs were getting underway on a cool night on Chicago’s north side. For the Brewers, it was an inauspicious start. In the top of the first inning, Cubs left-hander Matthew Boyd, roughed up for six runs (two earned) in the opening inning of Game 1, earned redemption by making Milwaukee the first team in this series to fail to score in the opening frame. In the bottom half of the first inning, the Cubs refused to become the second.
Ian Happ connected for a two-out, three-run home run off Brewers starter and team ace Freddy Peralta, who has owned the matchup during the regular season (2-for-32 against Happ lifetime) but not so in this NLDS. Happ homered off Peralta near the end of Peralta’s winning outing in Game 1 in Milwaukee, then took Peralta deep in their first meeting of Game 4 when Peralta grooved a 94.8 mph fastball in a 1-1 count.
“For me, it wasn’t a mistake,” Peralta said. “It was the pitch we wanted, but he was just able to hit it really hard.”
“I think it could have been a better pitch,” catcher William Contreras said.
Happ’s big swing made it 21 combined runs in the first inning of this series — three more than in the first innings of any other series in postseason history. Chicago has accounted for 11 of the runs, and became the first team ever to homer in the first inning of four consecutive postseason games.
“I’m asking the same questions myself there,” Contreras said. “No one said it was going to be easy.”
Peralta added: “We just have to clear our mind and move forward. Just get better and show up on Saturday and be us again. Especially in Milwaukee.”
What did he mean by “be us again?”
“Including myself,” Peralta explained, “I think we could be a little better. But it’s part of the game. They’re tying their best, too. We just have to put everything together: pitching, offense and defense and bring it back on Saturday. That’s it.”
While winning Games 1 and 2 at home, Brewers hitters went 9-for-20 with runners in scoring position. While losing Games 3 and 4 on the road, they were 2-for-13, including a pair of huge opportunities in the fifth inning of Game 4 when Yelich and Jackson Chourio each batted with runners at second and third in a 3-0 game. Boyd struck out Yelich. Cubs reliever Daniel Palencia got Chourio to pop out.
It was the last opportunity with runners in scoring position for the Brewers, who once had three chances in front of them to close out the Cubs and erase the narrative of postseason one-and-dones. It started with a bad hop in right field during the 2019 NL Wild Card Game and continued with first-round exits in 2020, ‘21, ‘23 and ‘24.
They believe 2025 can be different.
They have one more chance in Game 5 to prove it.
“The Cubs earned it,” Brewers manager Pat Murphy said. “They had their backs against the wall and they played great these last two games. They pitched great. They played great. They played great defense. They hit in the clutch. They hit homers. Yeah, they’re built to be great, and they played great these two games.
“Hopefully the tables will turn when we get into Game 5 at our place. But we have to find out how bad we’re going to fight back. We have all season.”
Of the 35 previous teams to win Games 1-2 at home in a Division Series with the current 2-2-1 format, only five found themselves in a winner-take-all Game 5. Three of those five lost the series.
So, just like back in August, Yelich was the voice of calm.
“I don’t think anybody feels the pressure of, like, ‘We need to win, we need to win,’” said Yelich, who with Peralta are the only players on Milwaukee’s NLDS roster who have been with the team through all of those early exits. “We’ve done a really good job of just focusing on the daily [thinking] of like, ‘Hey, we need to play well to win.’ We obviously want to advance and keep going in the postseason. We think we have a really good team that can do some things. But when you start looking at too much of a bigger picture your focus starts to drift from the immediate and the right now and what you need to do to be successful. Then you have divided attention, and that never helps you.”
