In their first truly stress-free win of these playoffs, the Dodgers slowly suffocated the Brewers in a 5-1 Game 2 victory<\/a> in the National League Championship Series<\/a>, riding a complete game from Yoshinobu Yamamoto<\/a> and a relentless attack from their star-studded lineup to leave the plucky, but overpowered hometown Brewers very nearly left for dead.<\/p>\n In every which way, this one felt like a mismatch.<\/p>\n Dodgers pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto celebrates after the final out of the Dodgers\u2019 5-1 win over the Brewers in Game 2 of the NLCS on Tuesday night.<\/p>\n (Gina Ferazzi \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n Milwaukee\u2019s staff ace, Freddy Peralta, couldn\u2019t limit the damage against the Dodgers\u2019 juggernaut lineup, giving up three runs in a 5\u2154 inning start.<\/p>\n Milwaukee\u2019s typically opportunistic offense led the game off with a home run, then hardly touched Yamamoto en route to the Dodgers\u2019 first postseason complete-game performance since a Jos\u00e9 Lima shutout<\/a> in the 2004 NL Division Series.<\/p>\n Even on defense, the Brewers came up just short. In very nearly the same spot as where he robbed Max Muncy<\/a> of a grand slam in a mind-bending double play<\/a> in Game 1, Milwaukee center fielder Sal Frelick drifted back on another drive from Muncy in Tuesday\u2019s sixth inning, made a similar leaping effort at the wall, but this time came up empty as the ball barely cleared the fence.<\/p>\n The Brewers, plain and simple, failed to stack up against the defending World Series champions.<\/p>\n And now, with a commanding 2-0 lead as the NLCS shifts to Dodger Stadium, it would require a major surprise for the Dodgers to let this series return here again.<\/p>\n Despite winning six of their first seven games in this year\u2019s playoffs, little of the Dodgers\u2019 October success had come easy.<\/p>\n In each of their previous three wins (all of which came by just one run), their opponent had the winning or go-ahead run in scoring position in the final inning \u2014 including a bases-loaded ninth-inning jam at the end of Monday\u2019s NLCS opener.<\/p>\n In the game before that, the Dodgers let the potential tying run reach base in the eighth. Go back one more contest, and the tying run was at the plate against the team\u2019s shaky bullpen.<\/p>\n On Tuesday, however, there were no late-game theatrics.<\/p>\n Behind Yamamoto\u2019s nine-inning gem, the team imposed its will from the start (well, almost) to the finish.<\/p>\n Only in the first inning, when Jackson Chourio went deep on Yamamoto\u2019s first pitch, did it feel like the Magic Brew was being stirred.<\/p>\n But then, the 27-year-old Japanese right-hander immediately quelled it, turning in yet another historic pitching performance from a Dodgers rotation beginning to make them feel routine.<\/p>\n Teoscar Hern\u00e1ndez hits a solo home run for the Dodgers in the second inning against the Brewers on Tuesday in Game 2 of the NLCS.<\/p>\n (Gina Ferazzi \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n Yamamoto was unfazed by a string of early traffic, working around a Muncy error in the second, singles in the third and fourth, and his lone walk of the night in the fifth.<\/p>\n He was dominant down the stretch, retiring his final 14 batters while finishing with seven strikeouts on just 111 pitches.<\/p>\n The Dodgers\u2019 offense, meanwhile, quickly staked him to a lead. In the top of the second, Teoscar Hern\u00e1ndez tied the score on a towering home run to left before Andy Pages shot a two-out RBI double down the line for a 2-1 advantage.<\/p>\n And from there, the Dodgers didn\u2019t relent, eventually pulling away after Muncy\u2019s home run in the top of the sixth.<\/p>\n With a swing that both stretched the Dodgers\u2019 lead and etched his name into Dodgers postseason history, Muncy took Peralta deep on the right-hander\u2019s final pitch, hitting his 14th career playoff home run (a franchise record) on a scorching line drive to center.<\/p>\n For a brief moment, some in American Family Field cheered, believing Frelick had denied Muncy of a long ball just like he did on the Game 1 double play.<\/p>\n Alas, Muncy kept rounding the bases this time as Frelick revealed his glove to be empty. And from that point on, a crowd of 41,427 watched in relative silence, as the Dodgers scored again in the seventh (on an RBI single from Shohei Ohtani, breaking a one-for-23 slump going back to the start of the division series) and the eighth (on an RBI single from Tommy Edman) to give Yamamoto breathing room to finish his complete-game domination.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MILWAUKEE\u00a0\u2014\u00a0The Milwaukee Brewers have used the slogan \u201cMagic Brew\u201d as the tagline for their postseason run. On Tuesday…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":304452,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[20417,154448,2442,27229,154447,5615,154449,8327,153523,10201,54078,62,3007,6620,67,132,68,2030,20410],"class_list":{"0":"post-304451","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-brewers","9":"tag-complete-game","10":"tag-dodgers","11":"tag-drive","12":"tag-inning-start","13":"tag-lead","14":"tag-magic-brew","15":"tag-max-muncy","16":"tag-nlcs-game","17":"tag-run","18":"tag-single","19":"tag-sports","20":"tag-team","21":"tag-time","22":"tag-united-states","23":"tag-unitedstates","24":"tag-us","25":"tag-win","26":"tag-yoshinobu-yamamoto"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115376334148084295","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304451"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304451\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/304452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} <\/p>\n
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