TORONTO — Pat Murphy approached Erick Fedde with a question ahead of Friday’s game: How did he view the Brewers when he was in the opposing dugout?
“Just a bunch of pesky guys,” was the answer the skipper got. “You blink your eyes and they scored four runs.”
In a much-anticipated meeting between the two winningest teams in Major League Baseball, the Blue Jays blinked first, and the Brewers’ pesky guys took every inch they were given for a 7-2 win at Rogers Centre.
This one was built on patience. A formidable pitching matchup between Freddy Peralta and Shane Bieber kept the game scoreless all the way to the sixth, with both starters posting nearly identical lines before the Brewers found their edge.
Did this one have a playoff feel to it?
“Yes,” said Peralta, smiling from his locker in the visitors’ dugout. “It’s really fun to pitch here. The energy that you feel is incredible and awesome. Me, personally, I enjoy those moments. No matter the result that we get, I enjoy those moments, when you feel the crowd like that.”
You could feel it before a pitch was even thrown. A sellout crowd of 41,390 filled the seats and set the tone, loudly reacting to every pitch, every swing, every play — until the Brewers sucked the air out of the room.
One at-bat at a time, Milwaukee put together a five-run sixth frame. It started with Andruw Monasterio, who belted a solo homer to open the scoring and add another improbable big moment to his season.
“He thinks that he’s a homer guy now,” Peralta said with a laugh. “But I’m really happy for him.”
Three singles, a double and a walk later, Bieber was out of the game and the Brewers had four more runs on the board. You really can’t afford to blink against these guys.
The visitors knew that would also be the case on the other side. The parallels between the Brewers and the Blue Jays have mounted ahead of this series opener. They are the “little things” teams, challenging the notion of the long ball as the ultimate path to success. To their credit, the Blue Jays played a clean game as well — in the field and on the bases. Still, the Brewers outplayed them at every turn.
And they had fun doing it.
“When you play really good teams … our guys feel like, ‘Yeah, well, let’s just enjoy it,’” said Murphy. “You know, let’s not get all uptight about it. Let’s just enjoy it. And these guys are young people that are loving their opportunity. They go in after the game and they check to see if their locker is still there. ‘I made it another day.’ That’s the beautiful thing to me.”
Peralta isn’t one of the young guys checking to see if his locker is still there, but he set the tone in many ways. The right-hander held Toronto to one hit over six scoreless innings with eight strikeouts and just one walk, outdueling Bieber and extending his scoreless streak to 21 innings.
“It does add motivation,” Peralta said of competing with Bieber. “I like when I have those guys on the other side. It makes me better and more competitive. I know everybody locked in, because we know that you’re going to have somebody there that is going to be giving their best, and that’s what we saw today.”
Claiming a series-opening win by recapturing their identity was a welcome development for a Brewers team fresh off its first losing homestand of the season. It was fitting that an unheralded guy like Monasterio — called up because of Joey Ortiz’s hamstring injury — was the one who got things going in the win.
That carried over to the following at-bats, and Murphy remembered his pregame anecdote when the Brewers put together their big inning, It led him to reflect on it again.
“I thought about that during the game, but I couldn’t find [Fedde],” said Murphy. “I don’t know if he was in the ‘pen or the bench, but I was gonna tell him, ‘Is that what you’re talking about?’ You don’t always see other people’s perspective. You can’t see what other people think about you. You just do what you do. …
“They just keep having tough at-bats, and if it doesn’t go well, the next guy picks them up. We’ve had a bunch of innings like that this year.”
