LOS ANGELES – At his lowest point, Jake Bauers didn’t merely want to walk away from baseball.
He wanted to get so far away it required an airplane or a cruise ship.
“He wanted to move to Costa Rica,” said Lauren Bauers, Jake’s high school sweetheart-turned-wife and mother of their two children.
"True story," Jake said.
“It was, ‘Let’s move to Costa Rica, let’s move to Greece. Let’s just get away from it for a while,’” Bauers added, laughing. “But I don’t think that ever got past the point of being an off-hand comment.”
“It was one of those random comments when you’re ebbing and flowing, and he was down in the dumps,” Lauren said. “But I’m ready to do whatever he wanted. We’re a team.”
And so they were together at Dodger Stadium on Wednesday, Lauren in the stands and Jake in the batter’s box for yet another epic at-bat against a Dodgers ace in the Brewers’ 6-2 win over the Dodgers in Game 3 of the National League Championship Series. The 31-year-old was a fitting hero for a team that finds itself one victory shy of its first World Series in 44 years because it is greater than the sum of its many different parts.
After hitting a 12-pitch home run against the Braves in August, and after his 12-pitch walk turned NLCS Game 2 in the Brewers’ favor, Bauers was at it again in the seventh inning of Game 3, when he connected for a go-ahead, two-run home run on the 11th pitch of a battle with Dodgers starter Blake Snell.
Talk about fitting heroes. The batter before Bauers was Andrew Vaughn, the part-time first baseman who hit .306 this season, but had to patiently wait for playing time, yet never complained. He worked a walk that snapped Snell’s streak of consecutive batters retired at 14. And the batter after Bauers was Garrett Mitchell, the former first-round Draft pick who played more games this season than his first four injury-plagued seasons combined, yet persevered. He followed Bauers’ homer with a solo shot for a 4-2 lead, representing a stunning turn of events after the Dodgers had rallied for their first two runs of the night in the bottom of the sixth.
Bauers took a called first strike before beginning to battle. He looked at two straight balls out of the zone, then got a foul tip on a changeup. With two strikes, he fouled off a slider and a curveball. After Ball 3, he fouled off a four-seam fastball, another changeup and another slider.
Whatever Snell threw at him, Bauers fought it off.
The two have history. They were once teammates in the Rays system.
“I’ve seen all the ups and downs he’s been through and it’s been a lot of downs,” Snell said. “So for him to go through this right now, he’s earned it. Hat’s off to him. I mean, what an at-bat. I threw everything I had.”
On the 11th pitch, Snell chose the fastball. He didn’t mean to throw it down the middle. Bauers didn’t miss it, sending his first home run of this postseason a Statcast-projected 412 feet to the right field seats.
It was the sixth home run on the 11th pitch of an at-bat or later in the postseason since pitch-count tracking began in 1988. And it made Bauers the second player with 11-plus-pitch plate appearances in consecutive games within a postseason. The first was the Cubs’ Aramis Ramirez, who singled and struck out in epic at-bats in Games 4 and 5 of the 2003 NLCS.
“There was for sure a moment where I thought to myself like, ‘Oh, you're in it again,’” Bauers said. “I was looking for a fastball, and I didn't want to miss it. I said I'll adjust to anything else, but if you get a heater, don't miss it.”
And the Brewers weren't done.
When Mitchell followed with another homer to knock Snell out of the game, the Brewers had their third set of back-to-back postseason home runs in franchise history. Bauers and Sal Frelick were the most recent duo in Game 3 of the 2024 NL Wild Card Series, and Orlando Arcia and Keon Broxton did it in Game 3 of the 2018 NLDS.
“Electric,” Lauren Bauers said. “That’s been every at-bat this whole postseason – electric. The first couple of pitches were pretty stressful, and then by pitch three or four, I was just taking deep breaths.
“I knew he had it in him.”
They met as sophomores at Marina High School in Huntington Beach, Calif., where Jake remembers sitting behind Lauren in history class and messing with her, “spitballs and the whole nine,” he said. Soon they were passing notes.
“Then you blink,” Jake said, “and you’re married with two kids.”
Their daughter, Marlee Jane, was born exactly two weeks before the Yankees traded Bauers to the Brewers for a pair of Minor Leaguers, when Jake was about to turn 28 and had kicked around with San Diego, Tampa Bay, Cleveland, Cincinnati and the Yankees. He hit .199 while mostly playing off the bench in ‘24, and the Brewers released him in November rather than take him into arbitration.
Bauers thought he’d had enough.
“It's not easy to bounce around from team to team and still believe in yourself the way that you need to to succeed in this game,” he said earlier this week.
Lauren heard him out but asked him to reconsider. Life circumstances also played a role when Lauren got pregnant with the couple’s second child. By then, Jake’s instinct was already to continue playing. He agreed to a Minor League contract to stay with Milwaukee.
It was the right decision. He boosted his OPS by nearly 100 points from 2024 to ‘25 in a part-time role while welcoming a son, Brooks Christopher, who was born on Aug. 2. In 2026, Jake enjoyed an age-30 breakout when he stopped overthinking and resisted being so hard on himself, playing a career-high 144 games and leading the Brewers with 26 home runs. Bauers’ 143 wRC+, a good all-around measure of offensive production, was seventh-best among MLB’s qualifying hitters – ahead of the likes of Junior Caminero, Elly De La Cruz and Shohei Ohtani.
“Everyone’s baseball journey is unique,” said Christian Yelich. “Everyone has their own experience in the game and a lot of those experiences end up molding you. You probably don’t realize it in the moment, but they are learning lessons and you come out the other side a little bit better. Jake has certainly done that in his career.”
“You really get close with people when you talk about the pains,” said Mitchell, who has had plenty. “It’s not just the good things that happen, it’s the adversities you go through. Especially in a game when we fail more than we succeed. It’s so cool to hear his perspective on things and how it’s led to this year.”
As Bauers stood on the foul line before Game 1 of this NLCS, he was about to bat cleanup in a series that could send the Brewers to the World Series. The moment required some reflection.
“For [Lauren] to do that and for her to allow me the opportunity to come here and kind of keep going and just support me any way she can, it's been crazy,” he said. “It's been crazy to see her growth as a woman and a mom. So I was standing out there listening to the national anthem, and I was thinking about her. She stuck by me this whole time when it wasn't always easy. I wasn't always the best husband. I wasn't always the best father.”
He stuck with it. So did the Brewers.
“You’ve got to trust your gut,” Lauren said. “I think he knew that he wasn’t done when he said he was done. It was a ‘half gut’ feeling, not a ‘full-gut’ feeling. And that’s why we’re here.”