MILWAUKEE – One of Brewers manager Pat Murphy’s quirks is that he regularly second guesses himself. That’s a rare trait in his profession, but the 67-year-old skipper was doing it on Monday in the hours before Milwaukee's 7-4 win over the Dodgers in Game 2 of the National League Championship Series after leaving Christian Yelich out of the lineup in Game 1 the night before.
The decision made baseball sense. Yelich bats left-handed, and the Brewers were facing one of the best left-handed pitchers in baseball in Tarik Skubal. Murphy had a lefty-masher at his disposal in Andrew Vaughn, and Vaughn even delivered a double in a game the Brewers won.
Still, it didn’t sit right with Murphy.
“I don't know if I'd do that again,” Murphy said. “Yeli going the way he's going, it's a great statement for our team, and everybody recognizes here's our MVP, here's our guy that has done so much. And he stood there and was as good a teammate as you could ever believe, but in retrospect, I'm happy it happened, but I don't know that I'll do it again.”
Flash forward a few hours, and Yelich delivered.
“I think expecting to be in the situation," said Yelich about his mindset going into that at-bat. "You come into Spring Training, coming into the year expecting to be in this series, most likely playing these guys. I don’t think it caught anybody by surprise. If we play clean, we play our game, we can hang with anybody. We didn’t play clean or play a lot of our game today, but it’s a credit to the guys for overcoming those moments where it could have spiraled on us. Just proud of the guys.”
His two-out, two-run, go-ahead single off Dodgers starter Yoshinobu Yamamoto punctuated a go-ahead rally that showed exactly how the Brewers scored the second-most runs in the Majors in the regular season (832) while hitting the second-fewest home runs (154). If you want to know how the Brewers find themselves in this position, one of the final four teams standing for the second straight season, their 40-pitch third inning was a suitable primer.
It started with a David Hamilton single from the nine-hole, where Murphy has mixed and matched with either his rookie shortstop Cooper Pratt or his third base duo of Hamilton and Joey Ortiz. Hamilton stole second, his first steal of the postseason after accounting for a team-high 30 of the Brewers’ 162 stolen bases in the regular season. Only four teams stole more.
There was a Jackson Chourio lineout and a walk for Brice Turang, who’d already doubled and scored in the game after hitting a huge home run off Skubal the night before. This time, he won with patience, taking a six-pitch walk on a cutter that missed just outside. Yamamoto pointed in and tapped his cap, an apparent indication he wished Dodgers catcher Will Smith had challenged. Smith did not.
William Contreras flew out to set up an epic battle between Yamamoto and Jake Bauers, the Brewers’ first baseman in the midst of a breakout in his age-30 season. Five pitches into the standoff, the count was already full. It took seven more pitches to settle it.
Bauers hit six consecutive two-strike foul balls along the way, two of them tantalizingly close for Dodgers defenders along the third-base line. They couldn’t corral either. When Bauers took ball four on the 12th pitch, seven minutes and four seconds after the plate appearance began, the bases were loaded for Yelich.
“It was pretty clear he was trying to get in on me a little bit," said Bauers. "It was a battle of not trying to do too much, don’t open up, let one come over the middle [of the] plate, if it comes, don’t miss it, if not, battle it out until you can take the walk. It was straight compete mode.
“It’s a mentality that we’ve been working on the entire season. To see it show up in these moments and be able to fall back on that and be able to battle, I think that’s what we’re all about.”
It tied for the most pitches in a plate appearance in Bauers’ career, including one in August of this year against the Braves that ended with a home run. It was the 12th walk of 12-plus pitches in the postseason since pitch counts were first tracked in 1988. It was also the longest plate appearance for any hitter against Yamamoto in the big leagues.
And two pitches after Bauers’ battle, the Brewers had the lead. Yelich punched a two-run single to center field on Yamamoto’s 36th pitch of the inning and his 75th pitch of the game. He secured eight outs before Dodgers reliever Alex Vesia took over and ended Milwaukee’s threat.
For the Brewers, it was a breakthrough against a pitcher who had been giving them trouble. Yamamoto limited the Brewers to four baserunners in a complete-game victory in Game 2 of the 2025 NLCS in this ballpark, then held them to two earned runs over 13 innings in a pair of starts against the Brewers in the 2026 regular season.