MILWAUKEE — The Brewers, short of starters by season’s end but long on smarts and creativity in the area of run prevention, spent weeks putting together a pitching plan for Game 2 of the National League Division Series. Four batters into that plan, they found themselves down three runs, but won anyway, 7-3 over the Cubs on a power-packed Monday night at American Family Field.
They won because a team that doesn’t hit many home runs hit huge home runs in bunches, and because a rookie flamethrower who couldn’t find the strike zone late in the regular season delivered the most pivotal stretch of outs in his postseason debut.
Surely there are lessons in there about the unpredictability of October in Major League Baseball. Best to let the smoke clear from the stadium’s pyrotechnics system before sorting those lessons out.
Andrew Vaughn answered Seiya Suzuki’s three-run homer in the first inning off Brewers opener Aaron Ashby with a three-run homer of his own, William Contreras hit a tie-breaking solo shot in the third and Jackson Chourio provided the exclamation point with a three-run homer in the fourth to back Jacob Misiorowski’s eye-popping middle relief and put Milwaukee in commanding position with a 2-0 lead in this best-of-five NLDS.
In postseason history, all teams taking a 2-0 lead in any best-of-five series have gone on to win that series 80 of 90 times (88.9%). In Division Series with the current 2-2-1 format, teams to win both Games 1 and 2 at home have advanced 31 of 34 times (91.2%), including 20 sweeps.
“Home runs are thrown, they’re not created. They’re thrown,” Brewers manager Pat Murphy said. “Sometimes that happens for us during the season. Sometimes we have to win other ways. But the key is you’ve got to find a way.”
In Game 2, the long ball was the way.
“You don’t see that from the Brewers very often,” Murphy said.
It was all so improbable. The Brewers had played 55 postseason games in their 57 years as a franchise going into Monday night and had not homered with multiple runners on base in any of them. Then they hit two three-run homers in the span of four innings, one from Vaughn, who’d gone homerless in his last 146 plate appearances since Aug. 15, and another from Chourio, whose availability to even play Game 2 was in serious doubt going into the day after he aggravated the right hamstring injury that sidelined him for a month during the second half of the regular season.
All from a team that ranked 22nd of MLB’s 30 teams with 166 home runs during the regular season, scoring instead with the sort of low-chase, high-contact approach that produced nine runs over the first two innings of Saturday’s Game 1 without a home run.
But it was a different kind of night on Monday, when Vaughn and Contreras each connected against Cubs left-handed starter Shota Imanaga, and Chourio went deep against righty Daniel Palencia. At 101.4 mph, the fastball with which Chourio connected was the fastest postseason pitch hit for a home run since pitch tracking began in 2008. The previous record was held by the Rangers’ Nelson Cruz, who homered off a 100.6 mph pitch from the Tigers’ Justin Verlander in Game 5 of the 2011 ALCS.
“Thes guys know how to compete,” said Connor Dawson, one of the Brewers’ trio of hitting coaches. “That’s what it comes down to whether there’s a layoff [during the first-round bye] or not a layoff. So it doesn’t really shock me. I think that’s the beauty of the team, is they don’t know any better than to just go compete.”
Vaughn’s home run might have been the biggest of them all in the way it erased the Cubs’ jolt in the top of the first. Dawson thought through some of the Brewers’ biggest home runs of 2025 and came up empty trying to come up with any that had a similar impact.
“That’s got to be No. 1,” Dawson said.
“That home run,” Contreras agreed, “was the most important part of the game for us. I think that home run put us back in the mentality of ‘no one thought this was going to be easy, but at the same time, maybe it’s not going to be so hard here.’”
“You get an out there and there’s no question,” Cubs manager Craig Counsell said, “it’s a different game. That’s what three-run homers do.”
Add that it came from a former first-round Draft pick whose career had stalled, and who was playing for the last-place White Sox’s Triple-A team when the Brewers traded for him in June, that he got scorching hot after earning a July promotion to the Majors only to cool in the power department during the final six weeks of the regular season, and Vaughn’s homer was even more unforgettable.
“It’s a really, really hard game,” Vaughn said. “I’m just trying to go out there, be the best version of myself and be like a little kid out there.”
Speaking of that, Misiorowski announced his first career appearance in the postseason with four fastballs to Cubs star Kyle Tucker that lit the radar gun at 103.4 mph, 103.7 mph, 104.3 mph and 104.2 mph, according to Statcast.
But the Brewers needed more than velocity; they needed outs on a night that was planned as a bullpen game all along, despite right-hander Quinn Priester getting loose in the bullpen and on the field while Ashby did his own pregame warmups. Misiorowski did the job by recording nine outs on 57 pitches, 31 of them at 100 mph and up, and 12 of them at 102 mph and up. He allowed one hit, walked two and struck out four in an outing that opens all kinds of tantalizing possibilities for Milwaukee’s pitching gurus if the team can keep moving on.
“There’s probably less than five people on the planet who can do what he just did tonight,” said Priester, who is set to start Game 3 for the Brewers on Wednesday at Wrigley Field. “Part of me wishes I could have high-fived him in the dugout.”
But he couldn’t, because Priester was not in the Brewers dugout.
Instead, he spent the entire night out in the bullpen, including after the game when he threw a scheduled bullpen session beginning at 11:10 p.m. CT. He figured it was the latest he’d ever picked up a baseball.
The idea was first proposed to him at 3:30 p.m. CT. Priester would go out to the bullpen to warm up alongside Ashby so the Cubs would think he was the “bulk” man for the day. But the Brewers planned a bullpen game all the way, with Nick Mears slated to put out the first fire and then Misiorowski to take a clean inning and go something like 30-50 pitches. Aside from the small matter of Suzuki’s three-run homer, things went exactly to plan.
Whether Priester’s decoy made any difference in the way the game unfolded was debatable at best. But he sure enjoyed it.
“Did they say already that it was a total deke?” Priester asked a reporter. “Or did you just know, because it’s a total Brewers thing to do. I didn’t care. I thought, ‘If this is going to help us one percent, or help us on one at-bat or one pitch, why not?’
“I wasn’t pitching today, so if that’s one way I can help us win, screw it. I’ll do whatever.”
