MILWAUKEE – In real time, it felt like Tarik Skubal was out-pitching Jacob Misiorowski.
And granted, in some ways he did. Skubal pitched well, just as the Los Angeles Dodgers hoped he would when they outbid the Milwaukee Brewers and others at the trade deadline to acquire him.
But thanks to a Brice Turang home run and a Luis Lara single, the Brewers scored twice off the two-time Cy Young winner. It wasn’t exactly stepping on his throat, the metaphor chosen by Brewers manager Pat Murphy before the game. Yet it was still one more run than the Dodgers scored all night.
“These are the games we live for,” said Turang.
“The goal in any game is to get the win,” added Misiorowski. “You can't go in a game and plan to strike out 17. You've got to just do what they give you and roll with the punches.”
As a result of Milwaukee’s 2-1 win, the Brewers are up 1-0 in the NLCS – already an improvement over last year, when the Dodgers swept them. There’s still lots of work ahead, but a dominant performance by Milwaukee’s pitchers has the two-time defending World Series winners playing from behind.
A great plate approach by the Dodgers allowed them to score first. With Misiorowski searching for the strike zone, the visitors combined two walks with two opposite-field singles in a 35-pitch second to take an early lead.
But while the Dodgers out-homered the Brewers by 50 in the regular season, it was only the Brewers who cleared the wall at American Family Field. Turang put an impressive swing on an inside fastball from Skubal for an opposite-field home run that tied the game in the fourth.
“Having seen plenty of lefty sinkers at 97 in on the black in my life, I have no idea how he hit it out to left centre,” said Jake Bauers, who singled and walked.
The way Turang described it, he didn’t want to foul the pitch off his knee. Other than that, he had no way to explain how he flipped a Skubal fastball over the left-centre field wall, though he did acknowledge “it was pretty cool.”
“A sensational performance,” as Murphy put it.
“Brice being Brice, you know?” added assistant hitting coach Daniel Vogelbach.
Later, Lara drove home Garrett Mitchell for a narrow lead and Milwaukee’s bullpen managed the rest, as DL Hall, Abner Uribe, Aaron Ashby and Trevor Megill combined for 4.2 innings of scoreless relief.
Afterwards, Murphy praised the group’s flexibility.
“They don't care,” he said. “They just want to get outs for the Milwaukee Brewers, and that's the beauty of it.”
As Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said before the game, the best teams lean into their strengths in October. In Game 1, the Brewers did just that.
“It's everything we can ask for,” Misiorowski said of the pitchers who followed him.
All things considered, Misiorowski’s start was an unusual combination of effective and underwhelming.
Objectively speaking, he did his job. Misiorowski held the Dodgers – a lineup so deep Kyle Tucker hits eighth – to one run in 4.1 innings. As usual, his fastball lit up the radar gun, as he sat 100.7 m.p.h. with his heater and topped out at 104. Absurd.
Yet the whole thing was still underwhelming. Misiorowski had trouble commanding the ball, walking three Dodgers. He balked Teoscar Hernandez over to second instead of picking him off. And he allowed the leadoff man to reach three of five times, preventing him from settling in.
“The kid's bound to be a little bit tired,” Murphy said. “I thought he was really good. His stuff wasn't great, no, it wasn't, but it's still pretty darn good.”
But while it’s unfair to expect start-to-finish dominance from Misiorowski, it’s reasonable to expect a Cy Young winner to finish five innings.
“I didn't think I had my best stuff,” he acknowledged. “Obviously good enough to make it work. Props to my defence behind me.”
While Dodgers manager Dave Roberts liked his team’s approach against Misiorowski, the end result was just one run – and an extended look at the Milwaukee bullpen.
“I guess the only solace is you got them in the game,” Roberts said.
As for Skubal, the pending free agent allowed two runs over five innings while striking out seven – a respectable night’s work, yet far from dominant.
Meanwhile, it was a relatively quiet night for Shohei Ohtani. He walked in the second and hit an opposite-field single in the sixth, so he did contribute. Yet he looked uncomfortable running the bases and we didn’t see the loud contact he so often produces.
As Roberts said, Ohtani’s “certainly not 100 per cent, but it's good enough.”
One game into the NLCS, the same can be said about the Dodgers. This isn’t how they wanted to start the series, but they’ve come back from greater deficits before and one of the most successful post-season pitchers of all-time starts Game 2 in Yoshinobu Yamamoto.
For the Brewers, there’s lots more work ahead, of course. But there’s reason for optimism behind Logan Henderson in Game 2. And as Game 1 showed, when the 2026 Brewers play their best, they can beat anyone.
“You can't go into a long series against a team that has the best record in baseball and expect to just win four," Roberts said. "It's going to be a long series.”
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