MILWAUKEE — Like D.I.Y. shoppers at Menards, the Dodgers got everything they came for.
Relying on their starting pitching to do the heavy lifting, the Dodgers came away with a 5-1 victory over the Milwaukee Brewers in Game 2 of the National League Championship Series on Tuesday night and headed back to L.A. having stolen home-field advantage in the best-of-seven series after taking two in Milwaukee.
The Brewers will now need to take two out of three at Dodger Stadium in order to send the series back to Milwaukee. Game 3 is scheduled for Thursday afternoon with Tyler Glasnow scheduled to start for the Dodgers.
He will have two tough acts to follow.
Blake Snell’s historically-dominant performance in Game 1 was followed by the first postseason complete game from a Dodgers pitcher since Jose Lima in the 2004 NL Division Series against the St. Louis Cardinals. Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who gave up a home run on the first pitch he threw in Game 2, allowed just two singles over the rest of his complete game.
Over the past three games – including Glasnow’s six scoreless innings in Game 4 of the NL Division Series – Dodgers starting pitchers have allowed just one run on six hits and 25 strikeouts in 23 innings.
The Dodgers’ desire to ride their starting pitching in October and minimize the exposure of their Achilles’ heel (the bullpen) is being fulfilled. Eight games into their postseason (seven wins), their starting pitchers – Shohei Ohtani, Snell, Yamamoto and Glasnow – have gobbled up 52⅔ innings while allowing 11 runs (nine earned) on 24 hits and striking out 63.
Jackson Chourio ambushed a first-pitch fastball from Yamamoto to lead off the bottom of the first inning with an opposite-field home run and raise the specter of Yamamoto’s July start at American Family Field. He didn’t make it out of the first inning that day.
He accomplished that with three consecutive ground outs after Chourio’s home run then worked around an error by Max Muncy in the second inning and two-out singles in the third and fourth innings.
Yamamoto relied on his splitter, throwing it more than any other pitch (33 of his 111 pitches) and getting half of his 14 swings-and-misses with it.
The Dodgers gave him a 2-1 lead in the second inning then eventually added to it.
At the center of Game 1’s most-dissectable double play when he tagged up twice, Teoscar Hernandez tagged Freddy Peralta for a solo home run in the second inning. Kiké Hernandez singled with two outs and scored from first when Andy Pages doubled down the right field line. That followed a 1-for-27 start to the postseason for Pages.
The instigator of Game 1’s most talked about play when Brewers center fielder Sal Frelick brought his fly ball back into play, Muncy cleared both the center field fence and Frelick’s glove for a solo home run in the sixth inning.
The home run was Muncy’s 14th in postseason play, breaking a tie with Justin Turner and Corey Seager for the most in franchise history.
An inning later, Kiké Hernandez doubled and scored when another slumping teammate got a hit – Shohei Ohtani slapped a single through the drawn-in Brewers infield to bring Hernandez home. Ohtani was 1 for 23 with 11 strikeouts before that hit.
More to come on this story.