3 ways Milwaukee can turn its road trip around

August 4th, 2019

CHICAGO -- Brewers rookie Trent Grisham collected his first three Major League hits, including a home run, but they went for naught in the finale of a weekend series that didn’t exactly live up to its National League Central showdown billing.

The Cubs completed a convincing three-game sweep with a 7-2 win on Sunday to finish a wire-to-wire weekend at Wrigley Field. The teams played 27 innings. The Brewers didn’t hold the lead at the end of any of them.

“It’s simple: We got beat,” Brewers manager Craig Counsell said. “We just didn’t score enough in the end. The pitching would’ve had to have been really good to win a game. It’s tough to win scoring one to two runs a game.”

Only briefly did the Brewers have a lead at all, thanks to 's Major League-leading 37th home run with two outs and the bases empty in the top of the first inning of the finale. But it was gone with one pitch in the bottom of the frame, when hit 's very first offering for a tying homer, and the Cubs were on the way to a win that left the Brewers four games back of first-place Chicago in the division with 49 games to go, including seven more head-to-head matchups.

Grisham’s three hits -- starting with a leadoff single in the first inning and his first career home run when the Brewers were down big in the eighth -- were relegated to footnotes in Milwaukee’s sixth loss in seven games. It was the club’s fifth loss in the first six games of a trip to three cities in three different time zones, which now rolls on to Pittsburgh.

“We've gone back and forth with these guys,” Cubs manager Joe Maddon said. “Every game is kind of the old dog fight. They're good. They're really good. So, when we play them again, it's going to be the same gig.”

Here are three things on the Brewers’ to-do list in Pittsburgh and beyond:

1. Don’t press

The Brewers have enough veterans in the lineup to know that the worst way to break out of an offensive funk is to try harder. But they also know something needs to change. Among National League clubs, only the Dodgers and Reds scored more than the Brewers’ six-run average per game in the first two weeks after the All-Star break, but in the nine games since then the Brewers rank last in the NL at 2.89 runs per game and last with a .155 average (9-for-58) with runners in scoring position.

Breaking out of that is easier said than done.

“You start digging yourself into a hole mentally like that, you’re going to pile on pressure,” infielder said. “That’s not what we need.”

“Offensively -- and, I’d say, pitching wise -- we need a big performance,” Counsell said. “This is kind of a time when you need a bunch of guys to step up. That’s how we’re going to put together good streaks.”

2. See if the new kid can provide a lift

Counsell said Grisham will start “some of the games” in Pittsburgh, where the Brewers draw right-handed starters on Monday () and Wednesday (). They called up the outfield prospect -- No. 6 in the organization according to MLB Pipeline -- from Triple-A San Antonio on Thursday for just this purpose, hoping a hot hitter who belted 26 home runs with a 1.010 OPS at two levels of the Minor League system this season would stay hot in the Majors. Sunday provided the first glimpse of that.

“It felt really good. A nice little weight lifted off my chest,” Grisham said. “Now I can just go out there and play. ... It just builds confidence to know that I do belong, and I can compete up here.”

3. Get the rotation on a roll

If the Brewers aren’t scoring in bunches, their pitching has a razor-thin margin for error. That was on display Sunday, when Houser eventually settled into his second start since rejoining the rotation, but not before falling into a 3-1 deficit by the second inning and yielding eight Cubs hits before recording his seventh out. He was outpitched by Chicago starter , who allowed one run on five hits in five innings and pitched with a lead after Heyward and Cubs newcomer delivered consecutive two-out RBI hits off Houser in the second.

Houser is critical to the rest of the season because the Brewers have used up most of their pitching depth. He has the tools to succeed, but will have to learn on the job as he navigates Major League lineups multiple times.

“I thought in the end he didn’t have the stuff going for the left-handed hitters,” Counsell said. “[That] is what hurt him today.”

Said Houser, “I don’t think we’re playing our best baseball right now, and that is obviously showing. There’s a lot of improvement for us to do all around. I think we can get there.”