The Milwaukee Brewers have used the slogan “Magic Brew” as the tagline for their postseason run.
On Tuesday night, the Dodgers made it feel like the magic was running out.
In their first truly stress-free win of these playoffs, the Dodgers slowly suffocated the Brewers in a 5-1 Game 2 victory in the National League Championship Series, riding a complete game from Yoshinobu Yamamoto and a relentless attack from their star-studded lineup to leave the plucky, but overpowered hometown Brewers very nearly left for dead.
In every which way, this one felt like a mismatch.
Milwaukee’s staff ace, Freddy Peralta, couldn’t limit the damage against the Dodgers’ juggernaut lineup, giving up three runs in a 5⅔ inning start.
Milwaukee’s typically opportunistic offense led the game off with a home run, then hardly touched Yamamoto en route to the Dodgers’ first postseason complete-game performance since a José Lima shutout in the 2004 NL Division Series.
Even on defense, the Brewers came up just short. In very nearly the same spot as where he robbed Max Muncy of a grand slam in a mind-bending double play in Game 1, Milwaukee center fielder Sal Frelick drifted back on another drive from Muncy in Tuesday’s sixth inning, made a similar leaping effort at the wall, but this time came up empty as the ball barely cleared the fence.
The Brewers, plain and simple, failed to stack up against the defending World Series champions.
And now, with a commanding 2-0 lead as the NLCS shifts to Dodger Stadium, it would require a major surprise for the Dodgers to let this series return here again.
Despite winning six of their first seven games in this year’s playoffs before Tuesday night, little of the Dodgers’ October success had come easy.
In each of their previous three wins (all of which came by just one run), their opponent had the winning or go-ahead run in scoring position in the final inning — including a bases-loaded ninth-inning jam at the end of Monday’s NLCS opener.
In the game before that, the Dodgers let the potential tying run reach base in the eighth. Go back one more contest, and the tying run was at the plate against the team’s shaky bullpen.
On Tuesday, however, there were no late-game theatrics.
Behind Yamamoto’s nine-inning gem, the team imposed its will from the start (well, almost) to the finish.
Only in the first inning, when Jackson Chourio went deep on Yamamoto’s first pitch, did it feel like the Magic Brew was being stirred.
But then, the 27-year-old Japanese right-hander immediately quelled it, turning in yet another historic pitching performance from a Dodgers rotation beginning to make them feel routine.
Teoscar Hernández hits a solo home run for the Dodgers in the second inning against the Brewers on Tuesday in Game 2 of the NLCS. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
Yamamoto was unfazed by a string of early traffic, working around a Muncy error in the second, singles in the third and fourth, and his lone walk of the night in the fifth.
He was dominant down the stretch, retiring his final 14 batters while finishing with seven strikeouts on just 111 pitches.
The Dodgers’ offense, meanwhile, quickly staked him to a lead. In the top of the second, Teoscar Hernández tied the score on a towering home run to left before Andy Pages shot a two-out RBI double down the line for a 2-1 advantage.
And from there, the Dodgers didn’t relent, eventually pulling away after Muncy’s home run in the top of the sixth.
With a swing that both stretched the Dodgers’ lead and etched his name into Dodgers postseason history, Muncy took Peralta deep on the right-hander’s final pitch, hitting his 14th career playoff home run (a franchise record) on a scorching line drive to center.
For a brief moment, some in American Family Field cheered, believing Frelick had denied Muncy of a long ball just like he did on the Game 1 double play.
But Muncy kept rounding the bases this time as Frelick revealed his glove to be empty. And from that point on, a crowd of 41,427 watched in relative silence, as the Dodgers scored again in the seventh (on an RBI single from Shohei Ohtani, breaking a one-for-23 slump going back to the start of the division series) and the eighth (on an RBI single from Tommy Edman) to give Yamamoto breathing room to finish his complete-game domination.
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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