LOS ANGELES — Jake Bauers delivered again for Milwaukee in the National League Championship Series, connecting for a go-ahead, two-run home run on the 11th pitch of a battle with Dodgers starter Blake Snell in the seventh inning of NLCS Game 3. Garrett Mitchell followed with another homer to give the Brewers a 4-2 lead, a stunning turn after Los Angeles had rallied for two runs in the bottom of the sixth to take a 2-1 lead into the seventh.
Andrew Vaughn opened the seventh with a walk that snapped Snell’s streak of 14 batters in a row retired, bringing Bauers to the plate. He took a called first strike, watched two straight balls out of the zone, then swung and missed at a changeup. With two strikes he fouled off a slider and a changeup, took Ball 3, then fouled off a four-seam fastball, another changeup and another slider. On the 11th pitch, Snell chose the fastball and Bauers sent his first home run of this postseason a Statcast-projected 412 feet to the right field seats.
The at-bat continued Bauers’ knack for grinding against Los Angeles. After his 12-pitch walk turned NLCS Game 2 in Milwaukee’s favor, he showed the same mettle a couple of years after he almost quit baseball. The homer was the sixth on the 11th pitch of an at-bat or later in the postseason since pitch-count tracking began in 1988.
Mitchell’s shot immediately after knocked Snell out of the game and gave Milwaukee its 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. The seventh-inning surge followed Chourio's first-pitch homer again in NLCS Game 3 earlier in the series.