LOS ANGELES – The 2025 Brewers will be remembered for overcoming a historically lopsided 0-4 start to lead the Majors with 97 victories. They will be remembered for the eight-game winning streak in May and June that set them on the right path, the 11-game winning streak in July during Misiorowski Mania, and the record-setting 14-game spree in August that had everyone wondering whether there really is Uecker Magic.
They will be remembered for winning a third consecutive NL Central title, and for qualifying for the postseason for the seventh time in eight years. They will be remembered for vanquishing the rival Cubs with their familiar manager in a roller-coaster ride of an NLDS, snapping Milwaukee’s streak of six consecutive postseason series losses.
“We aren’t that far. Not as far as it seems,” Christian Yelich said after watching the Dodgers celebrate. “I still believe one day that’s going to be us out there.”
The dynamic, old-school Brewers offense that won with discipline, contact and speed – and trailed only the Dodgers and Yankees in regular-season runs scored despite ranking 22nd in home runs – never showed up in the NLCS. Perhaps that’s the biggest shame of all, because it could have been a fun contrast. The closest the Brewers came to showing the Dodgers and a worldwide audience that version of their team was in the ninth inning of Game 1, when three walks, a double and a sacrifice fly put them within a run with the bases loaded. But Brice Turang instinctively evaded a wayward breaking ball that would have tied the game had it hit him, then struck out on the next pitch. It was all downhill from there.
The final tally was ugly. The Brewers scored one run apiece in four games against the Dodgers with 14 total hits. They mustered only 16 official at-bats with runners in scoring position to the Dodgers’ 35, and half of the Brewers’ tally came in Game 4 alone, when they were 0-for-8 including Turang’s run-scoring fielder’s choice.
“We couldn’t really get anything clicking,” said Turang, who finished the series 1-for-15 with six strikeouts after a .794 OPS in a breakthrough regular season. “It’s part of the game and you have to understand that. In situations like this as a young kid, you have to learn from it. But it was a great year. It was fun. It’s nothing but respect for every guy in this room.”
Turang had company on the list of Brewers hitters who had a series to forget against the Dodgers and their formidable starting rotation of Blake Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow and Ohtani, who combined for a 0.63 ERA in the series, best in history for the LCS round.
The Brewers’ .118 batting average was the lowest in MLB history for any postseason series of at least three games. Their .384 OPS was the third lowest in any postseason series of at least four games, beating only the 1905 Philadelphia Athletics (.373) against the New York Giants in the World Series and the 2019 Cardinals (.374) in the NLCS against the Nationals.
“We obviously had some guys not feeling their best at the plate. We had a couple of them at the same time, myself included,” said Yelich, who was 1-for-14 with seven strikeouts in the NLCS, 6-for-33 (.182) in the postseason and has not driven in a run in 17 postseason games since homering against the Dodgers in Game 7 of the 2018 NLCS. “There are some great pitchers who had some awesome performances, and you combine that with some guys scuffling, and it’s going to be tough to score runs and create offense.”
“We’ve talked about being an inch from the top and an inch from the bottom,” said Brewers manager Pat Murphy, who wondered whether his club was “zapped” by a hard-fought series against the rival Cubs that required a decisive fifth game to finally snap a postseason-series losing streak that had hung around the Brewers’ collective neck since 2018.
“You have to have been part of it to understand how it really zapped a lot out of us emotionally,” Murphy said. “And then to have to come back and play right away — and we lose a one-run game, it took us off it a little bit. Then the pitching performances by the Dodgers basically put the hammer down.”
After scoring three runs in 27 innings over the first three games of the series, the Brewers found themselves in a 3-0 hole after one inning of Game 4. Ohtani’s two-way brilliance was largely responsible for that. After walking Turang to start the game, he struck out Jackson Chourio, Yelich and William Contreras in order while twice topping 100 mph with his fastball, then led off the bottom of the first inning by launching a tape-measure home run off Brewers starter Jose Quintana that left the bat at 116.5 mph.
It made Ohtani the first pitcher in Major League history to hit a leadoff home run in the regular season or postseason, and it was just the start. He went on to smash an even longer home run off Chad Patrick in the fourth, making him the first pitcher in history to homer twice in a postseason game. Then he hit a third in the seventh off Trevor Megill.
Oh, and Ohtani carried a shutout into the seventh inning while hitting more home runs (three) than he surrendered Brewers hits (two) in one of the greatest October performances of all time.
Probably the greatest October performance of all time.
“That’s not the way I wanted to end our season,” Quintana said. “What Ohtani showed us tonight was amazing. A lot of credit to him. That guy is unreal. That was crazy. Amazing player. They were better than us in this series. They pitched well and they did the right things. It’s tough for us because we believed a lot in this team and to get swept is for sure a tough thing.”
Said Patrick: “That’s every baseball player’s dream when you’re growing up, is to be a hitter and a pitcher and be able to do multiple things on a baseball field. Kudos to him, he’s the best player in the world.”
So, Milwaukee’s World Series drought will persist another season. They haven’t been since 1982, when a club stocked with young hitters who would play together for a long time put it all together and got to within one victory of the championship ring everyone still desires so badly.
They will be back in 2026 to try again. But they won’t soon forget ’25.
“Nobody believed in us from Day 1 of Spring Training because we didn’t have the big names and all that,” said Brewers ace Freddy Peralta, one of the players who faces an uncertain offseason. “And look, we ended up with the best record in the Major Leagues at the end of the regular season. We didn’t make it until the end, but I think it’s huge. It taught me a lot, that you don’t have to have the biggest names to play and win games.”
Yelich still believes the Brewers will someday go all the way.
“You have to believe that,” he said. “I do, and a lot of these guys do, too.”
