MILWAUKEE – Brewers manager Pat Murphy has spent more time than normal in his office since undergoing back surgery last week, but he limped into the hitters’ meeting on Monday afternoon as the Brewers prepared to play the Reds. Murphy didn’t mince words. His team was in a weeklong funk with runners in scoring position, and while Murphy knew that clutch hitting ebbs and flows, he wasn’t fond of the approaches he’d seen. He saw a group trying way too hard to make something happen.
“It’s not what a championship ballclub does, if we’re interested in that,” Murphy said. “So, it’s got to change.”
In the two days since, maybe it’s started to change.
On the heels of Monday’s comeback victory in which infielder Joey Ortiz played the unlikely hero, the Brewers passed the proverbial baton on Tuesday night like they do when they’re at their pesky best, riding a four-run fourth inning and home runs from Jake Bauers and Jackson Chourio to a 7-2 win over the Reds at American Family Field. The Brewers are now 50-19 (.725) in their last 69 games against the Reds with a current six-game winning streak.
Milwaukee’s first five batters to step to home plate against Reds' starter Rhett Lowder in the fourth inning all singled, part of a 10-hitter, six-hit, four-run rally that turned a 1-1 tie into a 5-1 Brewers lead on the way to a 14-hit night, a fifth consecutive victory over Cincinnati in the past nine days and a third straight victory in a Brandon Sproat start.
“It was good to get back to our roots,” said Sal Frelick, who tallied three hits to finish a month of June in which he batted .348 with an .880 OPS. “We had a little meeting and discussed what makes us great, and it was great to go out the last two days and put that out there.”
The Brewers collected five singles with runners in scoring position in that inning alone. Frelick’s bloop hit to left field drove in the go-ahead run, and Ortiz added insurance with a bouncer over first base for two more runs. By night’s end the Brewers were 5-for-11 in the clutch, a breakout compared to the frustration of the previous week.
It was just the sort of approach the Brewers discussed in their meeting.
“It was like a meeting you would have in Spring Training,” Frelick said. “The season is so long, you play every day. It’s not that [the message] gets lost, but you might develop habits, or you have one bad game and then next game, everyone is trying to be the hero. It keeps multiplying and multiplying, almost like a snowball effect.
“So we talked about our culture as an offense, what we do in this organization. We apply pressure. Bunt. Hit backside groundballs. Stuff like that. I think sometimes just voicing it can go a long way.”
Tuesday’s reset actually happened after the first inning, when Lowder painted the corners while striking out Christian Yelich, Chourio and Brice Turang to begin his outing. The comeback began in the second when Bauers flicked a base hit the other way to left field.
It not only led to the Brewers’ first run, but it provided a blueprint.
“When you throw that much offspeed and you’re putting everything on the corners, you have to just give in and go the other way,” Murphy said. “The guys made a commitment to doing that. We got a ton of hits the other way, albeit not [hit] hard. We executed.”
That had not been the case for the preceding week, and it led to a level of frustration one might not expect from a club that just reached the halfway point of the season over the weekend with 50 victories, most in franchise history through 81 games. And the Brewers had won five of their last seven games coming into this series against the Reds, despite going 6-for-57 with runners in scoring position over one stretch of those games. But they are allowed to nit-pick. Winning three consecutive division titles and qualifying for the postseason seven times in the last eight years tends to raise the bar for what defines success.
“You look at something like that and you’d think we’d all be celebrating, but we’re all pretty pissed about how we’ve played lately,” Murphy said as this series began. “We don’t exactly talk about runners in scoring position because it’s not a good thing to talk about. You don’t put more pressure on them. You talk about more about the process.
“But we just have set the standard so high of playing well each night. And we, quite frankly, have not done that.”
The last two nights, the Brewers have done better.
“I think it’s a big testament to us that when it wasn’t clicking, we found a way to win games, which I think is just as important,” Frelick said. “Because you’re not always going to be clicking.”