MILWAUKEE – Jake Bauers scratched, clawed and crawled for the Brewers’ first run on Tuesday night. He smashed his shoulder in the process and dirtied his uniform. It was quintessential Brewers baseball.
And it bore absolutely zero resemblance to the rest of the night.
The Brewers set a franchise record for largest margin of victory and matched the club mark for runs scored in a 22-0 rout over the Mariners at American Family Field, with 21 of those runs crossing the plate over Milwaukee’s final four, wild innings at-bat for a victory that had everyone scrambling to check the record books.
“It was kind of crazy, and it happened fast,” said Christian Yelich, who was as responsible as anybody for breaking the thing open.
“It’s a tough one to even think about,” Mariners manager Dan Wilson said.
“I’d like to order that every night,” said Brewers manager Pat Murphy.
Games like this -- four home runs for one team, four errors by the other -- don’t happen every night. It tied for the most lopsided shutout win in Major League Baseball since June 28, 1887, when the Philadelphia Quakers -- you know them today as the Phillies -- thumped the Indianapolis Hoosiers, 24-0.
It was the biggest home shutout in 141 years, going all the way back to when the Giants defeated the Buffalo Bisons, 24-0, on May 27, 1885. Two teams have won 22-0 games in the years since -- Pittsburgh in 1975 and Cleveland in 2004 -- but both did so while on the road.
Then came a wild one in Milwaukee on Tuesday night.
The margin of victory was the widest in Brewers franchise history by two runs, besting a 20-0 win in Pittsburgh on April 22, 2010 and a 22-2 win in Toronto on Aug. 28, 1992, when Hall of Famers Robin Yount and Paul Molitor were still teammates, and the Brewers played in the American League. Their 31 hits that day against the Blue Jays remain Milwaukee’s franchise mark.
The Brewers “only” tallied 22 hits on Tuesday, but they made them count, including four home runs, all from the fifth inning on. That was a welcome sight from a club that, even after the dust settled, ranks last in the Majors with 117 home runs.
Yelich punctuated Milwaukee’s five-run fifth inning rally with a three-run home run, David Hamilton and Bauers both added multi-run homers in a five-run sixth and, in case there was any doubt, rookie outfielder Luis Lara added a two-run shot for his first Major League home run in a nine-run eighth -- when the game graduated from lopsided to lunacy.
Lara’s homer came off a position player, Mariners infielder Leo Rivas.
But it still counts.
“Maybe we’ll have a [celebration] for his second career homer when he gets one off an actual pitcher,” Yelich said. “But they all count. You’ll take every single one of them.”
That wasn’t the only thing weird about the eighth. When Yelich, hitting for the second time in the inning, lifted a bases-loaded fly ball to center field, Mariners center fielder Julio Rodríguez turned and threw the baseball into the stands.
Trouble was, it was only the second out. Yelich’s flyout was a sacrifice fly for a 20-0 lead, and the other runners on base were awarded two extra bases on Rodriguez’s error to make it 21-0. Lara then cashed in with an RBI single to make it 22-0.
"It was kind of chaos there in the last inning with the lineup turning over and all the action going,” Yelich said. “It just happens sometimes. You lose track of the outs."
Lost in that chaos was the fact it was a 1-0 game going to the bottom of the fifth inning, and that the only run to that point of the night had scored on what might have been a controversial play had the game not spiraled out of hand.
Bauers was waved home on William Contreras’ two-out single and found Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh waiting with the baseball. Bauers said he tried to execute a deft slide like he’d done a few days earlier in Los Angeles, but the way Raleigh moved into the baseline and blocked the way, it looked like Bauers slapped the baseball out of Raleigh’s glove with his hands. And indeed, the ball came free.
After that, both men were in scramble mode. Raleigh gathered the baseball and dove back to home plate. With on-deck hitter Yelich screaming and alerting Bauers to the loose ball, Bauers did the same. He was safe.
It wasn’t until hours later that Bauers realized there was some controversy about the play.
“I saw the replay. I definitely wasn’t trying to hit his glove,” he said. “I was more trying to protect him and me, because I didn’t want to barrel through him. I didn’t want to break my neck on his chest protector. It sucks that that’s the way it looks on video, but I definitely wasn’t trying to knock the ball out of his glove.”
Who knew that after all that effort for one run, the Brewers would score 21 more?