CHICAGO -- Christian Yelich was due.
When he connected with two outs in the ninth inning of the Brewers’ 4-0 win over the Cubs at Wrigley Field on Sunday and the baseball rocketed toward straightaway center field, that much was obvious.
“I put my head down,” Brewers manager Craig Counsell said. “I was pretty happy at that point, so I didn’t even see where it landed.”
Yelich’s monster homer off Cubs closer Craig Kimbrel flew 443 feet, at that point matching the Dodgers’ Cody Bellinger and the Mets’ Pete Alonso for the National League lead at 42 home runs (which Bellinger would surpass later in the afternoon), giving the Brewers three critical insurance runs on the way to winning the series and narrowing the gap in the NL Wild Card race. It snapped a power drought that for some players would be routine -- it was only 12 games without a tater, after all -- but for Yelich represented his longest outage this season.
“It’s been a little while, been a little frustrating,” said Yelich, who was 0-for-3 in the game and 2-for-11 in the series to that point. “I got that one pretty good.”
“It was coming. It’s always coming with Christian,” Counsell said. “The farther you get from something you say, ‘He hasn’t done it,’ he’s going to do it. But he picked a great spot for it. It couldn’t have been a better spot.”
The blast backed another stellar pitching performance from seven different Brewers arms, who combined on a four-hit shutout. Coupled with Saturday’s win, the Brewers won back-to-back shutouts on the road for the first time in nearly two years, their last time being Sept. 18-19, 2017, in Pittsburgh. Only once before had the Brewers won consecutive shutouts at Wrigley Field, and those games were spread over two months in ‘06 -- a 9-0 win on April 30 of that season and a 6-0 win on June 26.
The Brewers stayed 6 1/2 games back of the Cardinals, who won another walk-off Sunday afternoon ahead of Game 2 of their second straight doubleheader against the Reds. But the Wild Card standings look better from the Brewers’ perspective than when they arrived in Chicago. They departed within three games of the Cubs for the second Wild Card spot, with two tough games against the Astros on deck at Miller Park beginning Monday afternoon followed by a four-game visit from the Cubs starting Thursday.
“This is what you want as a player,” Yelich said. “We’re looking for another wild month.”
And they are looking for more series victories.
"This is what it takes. We’ve got to win series,” Counsell said. “We talked [coming into this series, which started a stretch of seven games in 10 days between the teams] that we have seven games against the Cubs, and we have to win the seven-game series against the Cubs. That’s what has to happen. That holds true, still. We’re off to a good start with that.”
With a full bullpen at his disposal thanks to expanded rosters and a lead after Orlando Arcia's run-scoring groundout in the top of the fourth, Counsell used Gio Gonzalez for three hitless innings and then matched up the rest of the way, deploying Jay Jackson, Matt Albers, Alex Claudio, Junior Guerra, Drew Pomeranz and Josh Hader, who’d covered five outs the previous afternoon but only needed 12 pitches to finish the Cubs off on Sunday. That group combined to strand Cubs runners in scoring position in the second, third, fourth, sixth, seventh and eighth innings. And everybody but Hader was pitching in a 1-0 game.
Give extra credit to Jackson, who worked two innings and was rewarded with his first Major League victory, and left-handers Claudio and Pomeranz, who each escaped tricky spots. Claudio inherited a pair of baserunners with nobody out in the sixth inning and got three outs on two pitches, then returned to get the first two outs of the seventh. Pomeranz struck out Anthony Rizzo and Jason Heyward with the tying run at second base in the eighth. Yelich finally provided some room to breathe in the ninth.
Welcome to September. The Brewers might not have the entirety of the All-Star trio of Hader, Jeremy Jeffress and Corey Knebel that that they rode to the finish a year ago, but they still plan to make liberal use of the ‘pen down the stretch.
“When your guys in the bullpen do an incredible job, it works out well,” Counsell said. “And that’s what guys did the last two days. Our bullpen was just magnificent.”
Said Gonzalez: “We knew what the plan was coming into the game. ‘Couns’ prepped us a little bit. But the bullpen has been fantastic. Guys have been playing their hearts out.”
The Brewers headed home as part of a jumble of teams chasing the chance to play in October. As they boarded busses back to Milwaukee, the Brewers, D-backs, Mets and Phillies were all within a game of each other and all chasing the Cubs for the second Wild Card berth.
Getting Yelich going again would certainly boost the Brewers’ chances.
“I haven’t played as well as I’m capable of,” he said. “It’s baseball. You’re not going to be on top of the world the whole time. You have to battle and fight. It’s how the game works.”