It feels like the Dodgers and Brewers have been heading toward this all season, doesn’t it? The Brewers have been the team with the best record in baseball. The Dodgers have been the team that, well, just won back-to-back World Series titles and desperately wants a third one. It’s an absolutely titanic rematch of last year’s NL Championship Series, which the Dodgers swept. And it starts Sunday.
Here are three key questions leading into Game 1 of the NLCS.
Dodgers at Brewers
8 p.m. ET, FOX/FOX One
SP: Tarik Skubal (LAD) vs. Jacob Misiorowski (MIL)
Wait … is that really the starting pitching matchup?
Right? Like, holy cow, that’s not a misprint. That’s not an All-Star Game matchup. Those are actually the two pitchers who are going to start Game 1 of the NLCS. You’ve got Skubal, the two-time defending American League Cy Young Award winner who has a 1.97 ERA in seven career postseason starts and looked fantastic last week against the Braves in the NLDS. And then you’ve got the guy facing him … who has actually been better this year. Misiorowski is likely to win the NL Cy Young Award and is consistently throwing pitches at a velocity which we have never seen in baseball.
With all due respect to last year's World Series MVP and Dodgers postseason hero Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Skubal and Misiorowski might be the two pitchers in baseball right now, the pair who strikes the most fear in hitters. And they’re facing each other. In Game 1 of the NLCS! This is the kind of matchup baseball fans dream about.
Which version of Shohei Ohtani will we see?
We all know Ohtani has had an injury-riddled second half. He hasn’t looked right for a while, which is why the Dodgers eventually shut him down from pitching and tried to rest him the best they could down the stretch. There’s no one who knows how to do that better than the Dodgers. After all, they’re as healthy right now as they’ve been in awhile.
But Ohtani -- you know, the best baseball player on the planet -- is the obvious exception. He still doesn’t look right, and his postseason numbers are clearly showing it: He went 2-for-13 in the NLDS against the Braves with no extra-base hits and four strikeouts. Manager Dave Roberts even moved him to fifth in the order for the first time since he joined the Dodgers.
We have seen what Ohtani can do in the postseason. He had an all-time showing last year against these same Brewers, when he became the first player in MLB history with three homers and 10 strikeouts as a pitcher. But can the Dodgers win a World Series if he keeps scuffling like this? They don’t want to find out.
Can the Brewers climb this mountain?
Last year’s NLCS felt like an existential crisis for the Brewers. They won 95 games, had home-field advantage in the playoffs and all the momentum and good vibes on their side … and then the Dodgers swept them in four games in the NLCS like it was nothing. Milwaukee was outscored 15-4 and managed just a .384 OPS.
This Brewers team is better than last year’s was, though. They have a fully formed Misiorowski leading the rotation. They have a deeper lineup and bench. Their defense is strong. They’re versatile. They’re coming off some absurdly clutch wins. Jackson Chourio is a postseason monster. They won 103 games this year. This team is so good -- maybe even the best in franchise history. This is certainly its best shot to win a World Series since 1982, when they were still in the AL and were defeated in seven games by the Cardinals.
But what happened to the Brewers last year has to still be at the forefront of their minds. Milwaukee has been the best team in baseball all season, but it is still facing the two-time defending champs who have knocked the Crew out of the playoffs three times in the previous eight seasons.
This is the mountain the Brewers have yet to climb. It’s the only one standing in front of them, the only thing left to do to return to the Fall Classic for the first time in 44 years. Game 1 may set the tone for this whole series, and maybe this whole franchise, which is hungry for its first World Series title.