Tropicana Field sounded like American Family Field South on Monday night, and for good reason. The Milwaukee Brewers are one win away from their first-ever World Series title following an emphatic Game 3 win over the Tampa Bay Rays (MIL 10, TB 1). The Brewers have a commanding 3-0 series lead and can clinch the World Series as early as Tuesday night.
"That team is very, very capable," Brewers manager Pat Murphy said about the Rays after Game 3. "This is a best-of-seven series. It looks like we're in the driver's seat, but it's baseball. Anything can happen."
Milwaukee took an early 2-0 lead in the third inning, then broke the game open with an eight-run fifth. At one point, they scored six runs in the span of 12 pitches. Brice Turang's two-run single off the glove of Taylor Walls opened the floodgates and was the second of seven -- seven! -- straight two-out hits. This might have been the beginning of the end of the World Series:
"Whether it's one out, two out, whatever it is, the guys play hard," Murphy said. "It's evident the guys play hard. They don't give in. They make every pitch count, and that's what it takes to win."
The eight-run fifth inning was the fourth-highest scoring inning in World Series history. The Tigers had a 10-run inning in 1968, the Athletics had a nine-run inning in 1929, and the Blue Jays had a nine-run inning last year. In a postseason that has been dominated by pitching and run prevention, the Brewers piled up hit after hit and run after run on Monday.
Robert Gasser, not Jacob Misiorowski or Logan Henderson, has been Milwaukee's best starting pitcher this postseason. He allowed one hit, a leadoff single to Yandy Díaz, in six shutout innings in Game 3. He faced the minimum thanks to a caught stealing and a double play, and at one point Gasser recorded 10 straight outs on only 26 pitches. Gasser is just the second pitcher in World Series history to finish a start of six or more innings by facing the minimum number of batters; Don Larsen did so in his 1956 perfect game. The Rays simply looked overmatched.
"Gasser did a tremendous job of just mixing," Rays manager Kevin Cash said. "He's got a quick arm. Pitched to the edges, filled up the strike zone. We felt we were 0-1 just about every at-bat. I think he had a five-pitch inning, and we helped him out a little bit by just being overly aggressive."
For the Tampa fans out there, you can take solace in the fact the Red Sox got blown out badly -- badly as in 19-8 -- in Game 3 of the 2004 ALCS. They looked dead in the water, much like these Rays, then they rattled off four straight wins against the Yankees to erase the 3-0 deficit. Here now are our winners and losers from Game 3 of the World Series.
Winner: Christian Yelich's hustle
Those two-out hits will get all the attention and that's understandable, but the eight-run fifth inning doesn't happen without Christian Yelich's hustle. The Brewers captain beat out a force play at second base (after replay overturned the out call) to keep the inning alive. If Yelich slows up, the inning's over, the Brewers are up 2-0, and it's a very different game. Instead, eight runs followed.
"The whole game was changed when Yeli was safe at second," Murphy said. "That's just a hustle play. When your leader makes that play, that says it all. The game was changed because he did a little thing that anybody can do. The first baseman with the right-handed hitter played way off. Yeli took advantage of that, got as far out as he could, safe at second. That's a game changer right there. That gives you another pitch, and that's sometimes all you need. Another pitch is enough."
Yelich is not a young man, at least not in baseball player terms. He'll turn 35 in December and he's had all sorts of back and knee trouble in his career, plus he's playing on turf, which is not pleasant to run on or slide into. Nonetheless, Yelich hustled to beat out the force play and his team rewarded that effort with one of the highest-scoring innings in World Series history.
All nine players in Milwaukee's starting lineup reached base and eight of the nine had a hit. All nine scored a run and eight of nine drove in a run. It was a total team outburst from one through nine in the batting order.
Winner: Jackson Chourio
The Brewers are one win away from their first-ever World Series title and their 22-year-old wunderkind left fielder has been at the center of attention. Jackson Chourio continued his Fall Classic star turn with a 4 for 5 effort in Game 3. He doubled and also stole a base. Chourio is the youngest player with four hits in a World Series game since Joe Garagiola for the 1946 Cardinals.
"He's a really good player, very good hitter, seeing the ball well right now," Cash said. "I think he got three hits on three different pitches. Covering a bunch of pitches. We saw him earlier in Milwaukee shoot balls the other way, stay on some pitches. Today let it go a little bit and drove some pitches."
Chourio is the 26th player all-time with multiple hits in the first three games of the World Series (William Contreras is the 27th) and the first since Adam Eaton in 2019. He's the youngest player to do it too. Chourio won't turn 23 until March. He's slightly older than the college players who were taken in the first round of the amateur draft in July. The young man is a precocious hitter.
Overall, Chourio is 8 for 14 (.571) in three World Series games and he's hitting .286/.308/.429 through 11 postseason games overall. That batting line may not jump off the page, but keep in mind that the league average is .216/.297/.339 this postseason. Chourio looks like Ted Williams compared to the rest of the league this October.
"He was tremendous. He was tremendous," Murphy said. "Locked in. Gives us a big lift. You lead off the game with that knock, even though we didn't score a run, it just gives us a big lift."
Jackson Chourio just showing off now as the face of the Brewers as Crew creeps closer to World Series title
Matt Snyder
Loser: Opposing aces
Assuming they win the series, no one can say the Brewers had an easy path to the title. They have won eight straight games and in those eight games they've beaten Tarik Skubal, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow, Drew Rasmussen, and now Freddy Peralta. The Brewers also have a ninth-inning comeback against Mason Miller this postseason.
Milwaukee continues to beat the other team's best, and in Game 3, that was Peralta, who failed to complete five innings and was charged with five runs after giving up two runs all postseason prior to Monday. He faced 22 batters and 10 reached base.
Fastball Freddy had been so good since joining the Rays at the trade deadline. In the end, he's just another branch that got fed to the Brewers woodchipper. The Brewers either worked long at-bats or ripped first- or second-pitch hits, nothing in between, and they had traffic every inning. The best team in baseball during the regular season has reached another level in October.
Winner: Resting the bullpen
Because getting blown out wasn't bad enough, the Rays didn't force Brewers manager Pat Murphy to even think about warming up Abner Uribe or Aaron Ashby, his go-to relievers. Uribe got four outs in Games 1 and 2. Ashby got five outs in both games. Murphy acknowledged neither is "fresh" after Game 2. It's October and no pitcher is fresh, but those two have worked hard this postseason.
The blowout and Gasser's dominant outing meant Uribe and Ashby (and closer Trevor Megill) had a restorative night sitting on the bullpen bench in the air conditioning of Tropicana Field. Uribe and Ashby will go into the potential World Series clincher Tuesday night having not pitched since Saturday; at this time of year, that's like a two-week vacation. The Brewers won the game and the game within the game too.
"It's kind of that chip and a chair mentality," Cash said. "We've got a seat at the table. We've got to do something with the chip. Obviously the only thing we can do is win tomorrow."
Loser: Home-field advantage
Man on the scene Matt Snyder reports the Tropicana Field crowd was about 50/50 Rays fans and Brewers fans. For most of the game, it sounded like 90% Brewers fans and 10% Rays fans. That was true even before Milwaukee's eight-run fifth inning. Brewers hits were met with cheers and so were outs made by Rays hitters. It was a unique soundtrack.
This was the first World Series game at Tropicana Field since 2008 (remember, the 2020 World Series was played at Globe Life Field), yet it was at best a 50/50 crowd. That certainly was not the reason for the blowout, but it had to be a little disheartening for Rays players to hear their ballpark taken over by visiting fans. It wasn't an intimidating atmosphere for the Brewers at all.
"It was unbelievable, and our players felt it, and they'll tell you about it," Murphy said. "The players looked around like wow. You could tell even during introductions, like there was a lot of people here from the Brewers. That's a statement about how much this team has captured the hearts of the people from Milwaukee and the state of Wisconsin, all the Brewer fans. It was amazing, the level of support we got tonight. It was incredible."
