The 2026 NLCS was a complete mismatch, though, not in the way many fans expected.
Despite winning 103 games in the regular season and employing a series of players unexpectedly having the best years out of their career, many believed the Milwaukee Brewers were big underdogs heading into the series. But through the first three games, it was the Los Angeles Dodgers who looked like an overmatched small market franchise flailing against the big-budget Brewers.
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Milwaukee, riding a combination of impossibly good relief pitching, exceptionally, uh, unexpected outcomes on balls in play, home runs, and a penchant for turning every ball put in play into an out, took a commanding 3-0 series lead into game four on Thursday night.
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In game one, they beat Tarik Skubal 2-1. In game two, they went 6-14 with runners in scoring position without a single hard-hit ball. In game three, they scored five straight runs after falling behind entering the seventh inning to coast home with a 6-2 win.
Game four then, set up an opportunity for Milwaukee to reach their second-ever World Series and first since 1982. For the Dodgers, it was the first of four win-or-go home games to try and save their dynasty and win a third straight championship.
For a few minutes at least, it seemed like they’d cruise toward forcing a game five on Friday night.
Against Milwaukee opener Shane Drohan, the Dodgers put together a quick rally. Kyle Tucker led off with a single, forcing Brewers manager Pat Murphy to go to his bullpen and bring in Dustin May. Teoscar Hernandez singled Tucker to third, and after Max Muncy struck out, Andy Pages finally came through with a runner in scoring position, lacing a single up the middle to give LA a 1-0 lead.
May got Kiké Hernandez to fly out, bringing up the Dodgers’ struggling superstar, Shohei Ohtani. Ohtani, who hadn’t driven in a run in the postseason, hadn’t hit a home run in nearly two months, and had been clearly battling multiple health issues, promptly destroyed a 1-1 pitch at 113 mph and 428 feet to make it 4-0 LA.
You could see how much it meant to Ohtani and the Dodgers with the rare show of emotion afterward.
But as always, in this NLCS, the Brewers superteam offensive machine battled right back. In the fourth, Brice Turang worked a one-out walk, and William Contreras crushed a ground-rule double to left field. Jake Bauers, who until recently was one of the worst hitters in professional baseball, followed it with another ground-rule double to right field. While the Dodgers struggled with runners in scoring position this series, the Milwaukee superteam took advantage of every opportunity. And why not? With superstar players like Bauers and Contreras, who was 9% better than league average offensively in 2026.
In the fifth, they pulled even. Sal Frelick worked a one-out walk, then stole second. The unremarkable offensive player, David Hamilton, continued his exceptional run by driving in Frelick with a single and raising his postseason batting average to .500.
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Two Dodgers relievers, Evan Phillips and Alex Vesia, then walked three straight Milwaukee hitters, including Bauer yet again, to tie the game at 4-4 heading into the bottom of the fifth inning. But that’s what unbeatable superteams do, they come back from 4-0 in two innings behind the best players in baseball, Jake Bauers and David Hamilton.
Sure enough, the Brewers untouchable bullpen immediately got to work, getting a shutdown inning as JoJo Romero got Ohtani, Mookie Betts, and Freddie Freeman in order on just 12 pitches.
In the sixth? The offensive juggernaut sprung into action. Garrett Mitchell, facing elite lefty reliever Tanner Scott, crushed a homer to right field, playing small ball and just making contact instead of trying to hit for power. Mitchell had two home runs against lefties in years worth of major league hitting, then proceeded to hit two homers off of Blake Snell and Tanner Scott in back-to-back nights. The Dodgers 4-0 lead, erased in a few minutes by the unstoppable force of Milwaukee’s unbeatable offense.
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In the sixth, the Dodgers got a one-out double from Kyle Tucker, but the Dodgers did what they do best: go hitless with runners in scoring position to waste the opportunity. In the seventh, they did it again. Andy Pages led off the inning with a double against super-reliever Aaron Ashby, and LA played small ball, bunting him to third with one out. Ashby though, wearing the correct uniform, got Ohtani to strike out on three pitches, and Mookie Betts to ground out to shortstop to end the inning. At that point, LA was once again 2-9 with RISP, the Brewers were 2-5.
Amazingly, the Dodgers did it again in the eighth. Will Smith doubled to left, advancing to third on an error from Sal Frelick. Once again, LA had the tying run at third base with just one out, and once again, the single greatest bullpen ever assembled in the history of professional baseball clamped down. Kyle Tucker popped up to center, and Teoscar Hernandez struck out on a ball off the plate by about two and a half feet. 2-11 with RISP. As one Dodgers’ commentator wrote, “some of the most pathetic at bats” you’ll ever see.
David Hamilton, who, again, is one of the worst hitters in professional baseball, provided the exclamation point with a home run off Edwin Diaz in the ninth inning. Why not? The Dodgers outhit Milwaukee, because of course they did, but when you have stars like Hamilton, nothing actually matters.
Milwaukee’s bullpen has allowed just two runs in the entire postseason in almost 40 innings pitched. A unit that had a 3.40 ERA in the regular season has an ERA approaching zero in the playoffs. The Dodgers stranded the tying run at third base in three consecutive innings, and it wasn’t even difficult for the single greatest pitcher who’s ever lived, Aaron Ashby. Fittingly, in the ninth, Ashby endured a 110-mph out from Tommy Edman and an obliterating 108-mph line drive from Kiké Hernández that was caught for an out. Because Ashby knew that allowing hard-hit balls is simply playing the game the right way. That’s how you reach the World Series, and Milwaukee did it.
The Brewers have shown how you ruin baseball, develop superstars like Garrett Mitchell, sign the best free agents available like Jake Bauers, use Cy Young caliber pitchers like Shane Drohan, Dustin May, JoJo Romero and Aaron Ashby to shut down talented offenses, and listen when your manager tells you to hit home runs or put the ball in play to the correct spot, instead of making outs.
That’s the right way to play the game, and the Brewers do it in spades. The Dodgers, after playing the game the right way in 2024 and 2025, stopped playing the game the right way in 2026, and it cost them.
For Los Angeles, it’s a depressing end to what seemed like a dynasty. In 2024 and 2025, the breaks, the clutch hitting and the quality pitching went their way. In 2026, that all came back to bite them in a single series. Milwaukee, though, proved why they should always have been overwhelming favorites to win the World Series: they simply have better players who are able to choose to hit .500 when it matters, instead of playing like they have their entire careers.
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Sarcasm aside, that’s how baseball works. The teams that win get hot at the right time, and all the payroll and talent in the world can’t predict which teams will get hot at the right time. There’s no explanation for it, it’s not a process or approach thing, there’s nothing to learn from it, it’s not meaningful or predictive, the postseason is a tournament, and tournaments have weird outcomes.
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Milwaukee will now advance to face the winner of the Guardians-Rays series, while the Dodgers will start the long offseason targeting their next class of highly paid stars: David Hamilton and Jake Bauers.
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