“We’ve got to get things going,” bespectacled Brewers infielder Eric Sogard said Thursday night, when his teammates were still stinging from a particularly dejecting series-opening loss to the Cardinals.

“Whether it’s play a little small ball here or there -- we knew coming in here we’d have to win three of five, and unfortunately, we didn’t come up with the first game,” Sogard said. “But we’ve got four more to play and we’re ready to turn to those and give ‘em what we’ve got.”

And that’s just what the Brewers did in a 3-0 win over the Cardinals in Game 1 of Friday’s doubleheader at Busch Stadium, playing the brand of clean baseball that has eluded Milwaukee for so much of this shortened season.

• Box score

There was the small ball that Sogard had called for, with Sogard himself delivering one of five consecutive productive plate appearances against Cards starter Jack Flaherty in the second inning. It went walk, single, groundout to advance the runners, Sogard’s RBI single and Orlando Arcia’s run-scoring groundout.

There was a long ball from Christian Yelich in the third, when Yelich smacked a solo home run, No. 12 this season, that flew a Statcast-projected 425 feet to straightaway center field.

And there was clean defense to back stellar pitching, with Brent Suter delivering four scoreless innings in his third high-quality spot start, followed by Devin Williams for two innings -- the first of which was Williams’ first inning all season that didn’t feature a strikeout -- and Josh Hader for his 12th save.

It was just the brand of baseball Sogard was calling for the night before. Especially those manufactured runs to give the Brewers a rare lead; they improved to 13-8 when scoring first, compared to 15-21 when the opponent beats Milwaukee to it. 

“I think that’s when the team is at its best -- taking what they give us, in a way, rather than just being up there trying to hit the big one every single at-bat,” Sogard said. “I think doing that in the ninth inning [of Thursday’s 4-2 loss] hopefully showed us in a way that it works when you do that. So let’s continue to do that, put together good at-bats, make them throw a lot of pitches and get some hits here and there -- whether they’re hard, soft, in the park or not.”

He knows the Brewers have little or no margin for error in the remainder of this series if they want to keep playing into October. 

“We know everything now is do-or-die, and if we don’t go hard, our season will be over in three days,” Sogard said. “So these three days, we’re absolutely going to go at it 110 percent and give it everything we have and leave it all on the table. That’s what we have to do and that’s all we can do.”