MILWAUKEE -- Brewers manager Pat Murphy emptied his legendary Rolodex for advice about how to handle the layoff afforded MLB’s top two division winners in each league. Five days doesn’t sound like much, but for a ballclub eager to get on with the best stretch of the baseball calendar, it is an eternity. Hall of Famer Joe Torre offered his words of wisdom. So did Murphy’s old friend Joe Maddon.
The consensus?
“They all said, ‘Brutal, man. It’s brutal,’” Murphy said.
So, the Brewers set about finding ways to turn the downtime into a positive for a team that “limped home” -- Murphy’s description -- on the way to winning a third consecutive division title and securing the best record in baseball. And the way they came out swinging in a 9-3 victory over the Cubs in Game 1 of the National League Division Series at American Family Field on Saturday, it looked like all that advice paid dividends, because the Brewers played exactly the way they did when they were rattling off winning streaks in the middle of summer.
They scored six times in an 11-batter first inning while turning Chicago left-hander Matthew Boyd’s start on short rest into the shortest postseason start for a Cubs pitcher since the 1945 World Series. They scored three more times in the second, then rode Freddy Peralta’s 5 2/3 innings, quality work from a well-rested bullpen and the energy from a decidedly partisan crowd to an opening victory in this best-of-five series between familiar foes.
“It was loud,” Brewers second baseman Brice Turang said. “I heard the Brewers fans. I didn’t hear anything else. It was a good time.”
“It was an electric atmosphere, especially the first couple innings there,” Christian Yelich said. “Those games are awesome. We live for playing in games like that.”
In postseason history, teams to win Game 1 in any best-of-five series have gone on to win the series 113 of 156 times (72.4%). In Division Series with the current 2-2-1 format, teams to win Game 1 at home have advanced 40 of 54 times (74.1%).
From the start, it was clear that even though it felt like just another 85-degree summer Saturday under the open dome, a Cubs-Brewers matchup would be different in October. Several Milwaukee officials with insight into ticketing said the resale market for this series was not as active as the three other playoff series underway, and hoped that meant Brewers fans who secured NLDS tickets before the opponent was known were resisting the urge to cash in and sell those seats to fans from across the Wisconsin-Illinois border.
That dynamic became clear when the crowd stirred as Peralta marched to the bullpen to warm up, and when a Cubs team led by manager Craig Counsell lined up for pregame introductions. This was a Brewers crowd. Not a split crowd.
“They were difference-makers,” Murphy said. “Our guys feel that. They’re not that experienced. There’s a lot of young guys doing it for the first time, and they carry with them an awesome sense of responsibility. To be ready today was fantastic, and the fans helped that. They were in it from the first pitch.”
“There's a lot of really good baseball teams still playing, and obviously they're gonna punch,” said Cubs first baseman Michael Busch of what came next. “It's just [about] counterpunching, and just don’t stop punching until that final out. I think we did a good job of that today, we just obviously fell short.”
How relentless was the Brewers’ early onslaught?
In their first inning of real, live baseball in six days, the Brewers scored six runs with help from Cubs second baseman Nico Hoerner’s rare error to match Milwaukee's biggest inning in the postseason in franchise history. (They also scored six in the seventh inning of Game 4 of the 1982 World Series and in the fifth inning of Game 1 of the 2011 NLCS -- both against the Cardinals.)
It happened fast. Six pitches into his opening inning on three days’ rest, Boyd had already surrendered doubles to Jackson Chourio, Turang and William Contreras that turned a 1-0 Brewers deficit into a 2-1 lead.
And it also happened slowly, when the Brewers’ defense-first center fielder, Blake Perkins, put together the game’s lengthiest and most impactful at-bat with two outs. His 11-pitch battle with Boyd culminated with a two-run single and forced the Cubs into their bullpen. It matched Jesus Aguilar’s 11-pitch double in Game 6 of the 2018 NLCS for the Brewers’ longest postseason at-bat on record (postseason pitch-by-pitch data only goes back to 2000).
The Brewers kept it going in the second. When it was 8-1 on Caleb Durbin’s bloop, two-run single, Milwaukee had more players with an RBI (five) than they had made outs as a team (four).
When it was 9-1 on Chourio’s run-scoring infield single, the second-year star was 3-for-3 with three RBIs, and the first player in postseason history with three hits by the end of the second inning -- all before Cubs third baseman and nine-hole hitter Matt Shaw had picked up a bat.
Chourio felt right hamstring tightness on that play and had to leave the game, the only blemish on the day for the home team.
But rust? The Brewers showed no signs of that.
“There’s a lot of fight in us, just grinding at-bats,” Perkins said. “This has worked for us. This is who we are. This is our identity.”
Even after a long break.
“If we don’t have success, then everybody’s like, ‘Oh, that layoff,’ and complain and explain,” Murphy said Saturday morning. “We knew the rules. We knew how this is. You’ve got to admire the team for having the most wins in baseball, and this is what we’ve got to deal with.
“We wanted the workouts to be ‘uncomfortable’ and competitive. I think we did that. But it’s not the same. You can bring fans in, you can play scrimmages, you can do all that kind of stuff, but it’s not the same. This is a hard game to practice with the same intensity.”
Whatever they did in closed workouts on Wednesday and Thursday, it worked.
“I’m kind of sitting there sometimes, too, like, ‘Dang, how are we doing this?’” Perkins said. “It’s a cool feeling, and it’s really fun to be a part of.”