By Yours Truly
When you have the best bullpen in the postseason, arguably, and since you’ve already made a thing or two about bullpenning as it is, why
not pull your starter after a leadoff walk? Except, of course, if it ends up backfiring in the long term.
Short term, Brewers manager Craig Counsell pulling his National League Championship Game Game Five starter Wade Miley, after walking Cody Bellinger to open the bottom of the first, worked admirably enough. Considering the bullpen expenditure of Game Four, including having spent Josh Hader for two innings, some might have thought Counsell was praying to pull a rabbit out of hat.
OK, there’ll be those thinking Counsell thought he could pull a fast one on the Dodgers and get away with it. After all, hadn’t Clayton Kershaw, their Game Five starter, been as much liability as lancer for them in the postseason? Hadn’t Kershaw come up with not his best even transitioning away from pure power pitching, never mind that his Game Two catcher Yasmani Grandal turned out to have clay feet, or at least a clay mitt?
Well, Counsell owned up to pre-meditation. “Yeah, that’s what we were going to do all along,†he said after the 5-1 loss. “Wade is going to pitch Game Six. If we went down 3-1, we were considering having Wade pitch this game. But other than that, this is what we decided we were going to do.â€
Counsell reached into his hat and pullout Brandon Woodruff. This time, he didn’t tag Kershaw for a surprise home run at the plate, but he did give the Brewers four solid innings and no Dodger nonsense. For awhile it looked like Counsell’s slickie was going to pay off richly enough.
Unfortunately, there came the fifth inning. On a day when Kershaw pitched close enough to his vintage self even throwing more breaking balls to go seven magnificent innings and, while he was at it, score a run himself in the bottom of the seventh, strike out nine batters, and allow only one run to be pried out of him.
“You could see the same look that you always see,†Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said of Kershaw as he prepared to go to work. “There’s a determination, and when you get a champion like him that gets hit around a little bit, he’s going to respond. And that’s what he did today.â€
More to the Brewers’ misfortune, the Dodgers got to Woodruff in the fifth and the sixth, ruined two more Brewers bullpen bulls in the seventh, and found their own bullpen making the 5-1 lead stick to the finish and to the 3-2 NLCS lead going back to Milwaukee. And not so suddenly, the vaunted Brewers bullpen began looking like a lot of bull.
They pried that single run out of Kershaw in the top of the third, arguably his testiest inning of the day. Dodger fans may have flashed back momentarily to Game Two, but nobody needed passed balls or catcher’s errors this time. All the Brewers needed was a one-out single from Orlando Arcia, a walk to Woodruff himself, and Lorenzo Cain’s RBI double to get that run.
Two strikeouts sandwiching a walk to Ryan Braun later, Kershaw slithered out of the jam and proceeded to get rid of his next twelve opposing batters in order before the Dodger pen opened.
Kershaw’s breaking balls were so effective that they fooled the Brewers almost completely. “I think it was a changeup,†Brewers catcher Eric Kratz said when asked what murdered him on 1-1 in the fourth, before someone reminded him you could count on a single hand how often Kershaw throws one. “Oh,†he replied. “Maybe that’s why I swung so bad at it.â€
His back issues of the past three seasons have taken a toll on Kershaw’s repertoire. Once upon a time, he had a deadly fastball/slider combination thrown for top speed and movement; now, he works his curve ball more frequently—it was always one of the nastier hooks in the business—and make it give the heat-and-slide combination a deadlier look than it really has.
“If I’m able to throw [the curve ball] for strikes,†Kershaw said after the game, “it gives them a different speed and depth to look at. It’s definitely important.†Important enough that he got eight swinging misses on that curve Wednesday, which was five more than he got in Game Two. His thirteen other Game Five curves got three strikes, three balls, five fouls, and two ground outs.
Kershaw sat in the Dodger dugout through every inning of Game Four’s thirteen-inning marathon, right up to the moment Cody Bellinger slashed the game-ending single to right. Every report around him since says reliably that he wanted nothing more than to go as deep as possible in Game Five and give the bullpen a badly needed break.
Mission accomplished. He handed the pen a four-run lead to work with after Max Muncy and Yasiel Puig singled home a pair of runs in the sixth and scored another pair in the seventh. Kershaw himself started those proceedings by drawing a one-out walk. Bellinger sent a double to the back of center field and Justin Turner made his first break out of a slump with the single up the pipe that pushed Kershaw home and Bellinger to third. Then pinch hitter Brian Dozier pushed Bellinger home on a ground out to third.
The Dodgers might have gotten a sixth run. Puig electrified even the Brewers’ audience when he ripped one for a base hit with one out in the eighth, hit the afterburners almost before he was half up the first base line, and hustled his way to second to make it a double. But Brewers reliever Zach Davis—the roster replacement for Gio Gonzalez, whose Game Four rolled ankle trying to field a ball in the first turned up a sprain enough to knock him out of the rest of the postseason—struck out Austin Barnes, Kershaw’s catcher for the day, and got pinch hitter Matt Kemp to ground out to short.
What was Kershaw himself thinking when Counsell delivered his Miley gambit and went right to Woodruff? “I was just thinking that I have to get Woodruff out,†he cracked. Woodruff, after all, had surprised Kershaw and everyone else in Miller Park when he sent a 2-2 service over the right field fence in the bottom of the Game Two third.
Consell’s Miley gambit lets him start Miley in Game Six. His better bullpen bulls may be rested just enough for duty in the first of possibly two elimination games the Brewers now face. But for now his bullpenning ran smack dab into Kershaw finding his best new self. And left him and his remarkable enough Brewers one game, one failed gambit, one bullpen hiccup from winter vacation.
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