MILWAUKEE – After playing a whole series in their new City Connect uniforms, the Brewers still haven’t put the “W” in Wisco.
They solved their hitting woes with four home runs but played shaky defense and got shakier relief, and they got swept at home by the Nationals for the first time in two decades with Sunday’s 8-6 loss at American Family Field. The Brewers dropped a fifth straight game despite Brice Turang hitting a pair of solo shots for his second career multi-homer game and Gary Sánchez smashed a towering, three-run blast that temporarily tied the game in the seventh.
The Nationals, who came to town with seven losses in their last eight games and the National League’s worst ERA, kept fighting. The visitors scored four times in the seventh inning and twice more in the eighth after Brandon Woodruff’s early hook to finish Washington’s first series sweep in Milwaukee since June 2006 – when Jorge De La Rosa was the Brewers’ losing pitcher and Prince Fielder was a rookie first baseman.
“Tough times,” Brewers manager Pat Murphy said. “We haven’t been in these waters much in the last three years.”
There was no arguing that. Before this weekend, the Brewers hadn’t lost five games in a row since a six-game skid in June 2023, the season prior to Murphy’s promotion from bench coach to manager.
If all that wasn’t enough to get a Brewers fan down, Christian Yelich left the game in the fifth inning with a tight left hamstring. He was undergoing additional testing after the game, but Murphy indicated that he’s not expecting good news on that front.
“We’ll respond. We’ll figure it out,” said Turang, who praised the plucky Nationals for their play. “If we made a mistake, they capitalized on it. ... If you can do those things, you win ballgames. When we do those things, we win ballgames, too. We just have to go back to playing our game, playing our style."
That means persistent hitting and playing sharp defense, which, Sunday’s homers aside, the Brewers haven’t been doing. Sánchez’s home run was Milwaukee’s lone at-bat with a runner in scoring position, bringing the Brewers to 2-for-24 in the clutch during their losing streak. And after making only one error in their first 12 games, fewest in the Majors, they made six errors in the last three games, most in MLB.
“First and foremost, we’ve got to credit the Nationals,” Murphy said. “They played fantastic. They played loose, they played free, they’re hungry. They had the right mix today. They hit a bunch of balls hard. They stayed after it. They base-ran. They executed. They were terrific for these three games.
“I know their record doesn’t indicate it, but they were a scrappy team that played right, and we didn’t. We did little things that are not typical of how we play. Every team is going to go through this. It hurts like crazy, but I still like our team.”
Woodruff did his part, beginning the day nine up, nine down and limiting Washington to two runs (one earned) on three hits in six innings. Under different circumstances he might have continued, but with an off-day coming Monday and a reasonably rested array of relievers to protect a one-run lead, and considering Woodruff’s pitch count last time out in Boston (94), and that he’s pitched past the sixth inning only one time since 2023 because of injury, the Brewers turned the game over to their bullpen in the seventh.
That’s when the Nationals pounced. They scored four runs on four hits and a walk against two of the Brewers’ best relievers, Abner Uribe and Angel Zerpa, who combined to see a 3-2 lead turn into a 6-3 deficit.
Sánchez tied it up in the seventh after an injury to Nationals reliever Ken Waldichuk forced an emergency pitching change, but Washington pushed right back in front against Zerpa and Aaron Ashby in the eighth when Keibert Ruiz greeted Ashby with a two-run single.
“We discussed it in between innings, and I was fine to go out [for the seventh] but I was getting over the edge in terms of how I was feeling,” Woodruff said. “We had our guys ready. It’s the right move.”
Murphy said the same. Neither man wavered.
“It’s all hindsight,” Woodruff said. “You can pick apart everything when it comes to that. I could have gone out and gave it up, just as easily. You don’t know, so you can’t play those ‘what if?’ games. We had our guys ready to go. It’s just one of those things where you have to credit [Washington’s] lineup. They battled and put the ball in play and found holes.”
Now it’s the Brewers who are slumping. After winning eight of their first 10 games, they will carry an 8-7 record into the next series on this homestand, a three-game set with the American League champion Blue Jays.
“We’ve got a really good team. When we play our game, we’re hard to beat,” Turang said. “We know that. It’s just understanding, each individual guy, to trust each other and trust themselves.”