MILWAUKEE – Christian Yelich has done a lot of things in his career, but he’d never hit a pinch-hit home run.
What a moment for the first.
The Brewers, who trailed 4-0 before the first out of the ballgame, 7-2 in the third inning and 7-3 going into the bottom of the eighth, stormed all the way back for a 9-7 win over the White Sox at American Family Field on Sunday to finish a series-opening, three-game sweep.
They capped the weekend with a six-run, eighth-inning rally punctuated by Yelich’s first career homer off the bench, a two-out, two-strike, three-run shot that looked like it might scrape the underside of Milwaukee’s closed dome before wrapping around the right-field foul pole. It was the second consecutive two-out, two-strike, multi-run hit for the Brewers, who saw Luis Rengifo make it a one-run game with a two-RBI single – his first hit in a Brewers uniform – immediately preceding Yelich.
Yelich has won one National League MVP Award and finished runner-up in another year, so it’s no surprise that he is not particularly accustomed to pinch-hitting. He’d done so 37 times in his career before Sunday, and was 7-for-31 in those plate appearances with zero extra-base hits.
The go-ahead rally started against White Sox left-hander Chris Murphy and paid off against Chicago’s new closer, Seranthony Domínguez, who took over a 7-4 ballgame and retired William Contreras on a pop-out before Rengifo and Yelich came through with two outs.
The result was a no-decision for Brewers rotation newcomer Brandon Sproat, who surrendered home runs in each of his three innings on the mound, including Colson Montgomery’s grand slam with nobody out in the top of the first inning. Sproat was out of the game after throwing 86 pitches in three innings, which, it turned out, meant that there was plenty of game to go.