Bauers refuses to give up – not on his career, not against a pair of Dodgers aces

LOS ANGELES – Jake Bauers almost quit baseball a couple of years ago, but he didn’t give up.

What a fitting hero for the Brewers’ 6-2 win over the Dodgers in Game 3 of the National League Championship Series on Wednesday, and for a team that finds itself one victory shy of its first World Series in 44 years because it is greater than the sum of its many different parts.

After his 12-pitch walk turned NLCS Game 2 in the Brewers’ favor, Bauers was at it again in the seventh inning of Game 3, when he connected for a go-ahead, two-run home run on the 11th pitch of a battle with Dodgers starter Blake Snell.

Then Garrett Mitchell followed with another home run for a 4-2 lead, a stunning turn of events after the Dodgers had rallied for their first two runs of the night in the bottom of the sixth to hand Snell a 2-1 lead going to the seventh. When Andrew Vaughn opened the inning with a walk, it snapped Snell’s streak of 14 batters in a row retired.

Then came Bauers, who took a called first strike before beginning to battle. He looked at two straight balls out of the zone, then got a foul tip on a changeup. With two strikes, he fouled off a slider and a curveball. After Ball 3, he fouled off a four-seam fastball, another changeup and another slider.

Whatever Snell threw at him, Bauers fought it off.

On the 11th pitch, Snell chose the fastball. Bauers didn’t miss it, sending his first home run of this postseason a Statcast-projected 412 feet to the right field seats.

It was the sixth home run on the 11th pitch of an at-bat or later in the postseason since pitch-count tracking began in 1988. And the Brewers weren't done.

When Mitchell followed with another homer to knock Snell out of the game, the Brewers had their third set of back-to-back postseason home runs in franchise history. Bauers and Sal Frelick were the most recent duo in Game 3 of the 2024 NL Wild Card Series, and Orlando Arcia and Keon Broxton did it in Game 3 of the 2018 NLDS.

It was after that pinch-hit home run against the Mets in the ‘24 postseason that Bauers considered calling it a career. He was three days shy of his 29th birthday and had kicked around with San Diego, Tampa Bay, Cleveland, Cincinnati and the Yankees before being traded to the Brewers for a pair of Minor Leaguers after the 2023 season. After he hit .199 while mostly playing off the bench in ‘24, the Brewers released him in November rather than take him into arbitration.

Bauers thought he’d had enough.

“It's not easy to bounce around from team to team and still believe in yourself the way that you need to to succeed in this game,” he said earlier this week.

His wife, Lauren, convinced him to reconsider. Life circumstances also played a role when Lauren got pregnant with the couple’s second child. Bauers agreed to a Minor League contract to stay with Milwaukee.

It was the right decision. He boosted his OPS by nearly 100 points from 2024 to ‘25 in a part-time role, then enjoyed an age-30 breakout this season, playing a career-high 144 games and leading the Brewers with 26 home runs. Bauers’ 143 wRC+, a good all-around measure of offensive production, was seventh-best among MLB’s qualifying hitters – ahead of the likes of Junior Caminero, Elly De La Cruz and Shohei Ohtani.

As Bauers stood on the foul line before Game 1 of a series that could send Milwaukee to a World Series, the Brewers' cleanup hitter reflected.

“There's a lot of people I can give credit to, a lot on the staff here for sure,” he said. “But I was thinking a lot about my wife. We have two kids, and she's holding it down at home by herself a lot of the time, which is a lot. Those kids, they're a blessing and we love them, but man, they're a handful.

“For her to do that and for her to allow me the opportunity to come here and kind of keep going and just support me any way she can, it's been crazy. It's been crazy to see her growth as a woman and a mom. So I was standing out there listening to the national anthem, and I was thinking about her. She stuck by me this whole time when it wasn't always easy. I wasn't always the best husband. I wasn't always the best father.”

He stuck with it. So did the Brewers.

After getting swept by the Dodgers in last year’s postseason, they are one win shy of returning the favor. No team has ever done that.

And more importantly, they are one win shy of bringing the World Series to Milwaukee for the first time since 1982.