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| let the ghost of Bob Uecker rejoice |
Down by a run with the bases loaded and two out in the bottom of the ninth in the second game of the NLDS between the Milwaukee Brewers and the San Diego Padres (two perfectly likeable teams both historically and presently, in my view), the Brewers' Jackson Chourio got a piece, but just a piece, of a one-two Mason Miller fastball low and away that came in at 104MPH, and couldn't believe he didn't do more with the pitch than foul it straight back (straight back, as you know, means you were pretty much right on it). It seemed to me perhaps the surest sign yet that, on the fundamental level of the central conflict between batter and pitcher very much at the heart of everything, baseball really is in some ways radically different than the sport I grew up with (in fairness, more than forty years have passed). This is the only point in baseball history (pick any of Ken Burns' ten innings you like) where that pitch is something that is going to exist at all, for starters, let alone something a hitter is going to feel like he should have done something with other than just tip his cap to his foe for having thrown a literally unhittable pitch. But there he was, Jackson Chourio, cursing himself as he held the bat close enough to sniff that burnt wood smell you get for a moment after a pitch really whistles off of there (in some ways, baseball remains very much the same). Two pitches later, Chourio turns one around, and brings in both the tying and winning runs in the best at-bat in the best game in the best series of this second round of the 2026 postseason (full at-bat here; field-level video of the hit here). He's only twenty-two, so is probably unaware that he's not supposed to be able to do any of this. Miller, the Padres' great closer, may have been tipping his pitches as he attempted (and nearly managed) this six-out save (Jomboy had something on him, but only from the centre-field camera; that the Brewers saw something subtler looking directly at him is almost certainly the case but remains a minor mystery [embrace it, I say]), but another factor to be considered, I would suggest, is that Miller's wife was, at that very moment, super pregnant (this is not to impugn his professionalism or anything ludicrous like that, but to merely acknowledge his humanity). Miller would miss the next game, one in which the Padres could have been eliminated, as he took to the paternity list (this seemed to me another way the game has changed, surely for the better), and welcomed a tiny baby (great job, everybody). His family's midwife, a Padres superfan, broke the news that the Padres had won (Miller himself notes that he had not been checking the score) and that he therefore might be expected back for at least one more if at all possible. The Padres were out not long after, though, eliminated at home, with Fernando Tatis Jr. and Joe Musgrove out on the field late into the night just tossing up the ball and hitting it across the field, five-hundred-up style (one of the greatest ways you can possibly spend your time), to mark the end of their summer a few weeks into fall. Maybe next year for these Padres, who seem nearly good enough, most of the time?
I'm glad I got in early with not just one but in fact several of my baseball pals with the notion that the Brewers really seem like the have a great shot against this year's Dodgers, who, for their part, dispatched an able Atlanta squad in four games (thrills! as Téo hits a clutch bomb! chills! as he takes an idiosyncratic route to what turns out to be a triple!), but who looked older, and slower, and more banged up than you're used to seeing. Shohei Ohtani is mired in the worst (and really the first) extended slump of his major-league career: he hasn't homered since the middle of August, is hitting below .200 in that time, and has been, as widely discussed, too hurt to pitch. At our moment of composition, the Brewers are up two-games-to-none already in the NLCS, having beaten both Tarik Skubal and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, which is no mean feat (I recall the 2025 Blue Jays having more than a few problems with Yamamoto; perhaps you, too, recall this). Stranger things have happened, surely, than the Dodgers winning four of five, but even for them, it's a tall order against these one-hundred-and-four-win Brewers (that is so many wins, even if you play in the NL Central).
The ALDSs (this is how I choose to pluralized ALDS, but I invite you to follow your own path) did not grab me the same way as either of the National Leagues series (no Brewers/Padres game, for instance, ever had more than a two-run lead, meaning every time a runner got on, the tying run was at the plate; that's intense!), but I am certainly petty enough to welcome any and every sweep of the New York Yankees, particularly one in which the Yankees committed three errors not just in a single game, but in a single inning, and indeed the first inning of that single game (they would add a fourth later, and charitable/humane scoring is all that stood between them and a fifth). The Rays have looked like the best team in the AL all season long, and that certainly did not let up for even a moment here. The Rays' two home games actually drew big enough crowds to make Tampa look like a plausible place for baseball, so long as the Yankees are in town; I guess we'll see how that shakes out going forward, but the vibes were certainly strong in this round. A welcome change!
It's a shame that the underdog, papacy-compliant White Sox, improbably here after back-to-back one-hundred-loss seasons, couldn't make it any farther, especially after winning the first two games in their fairly miserable everybody-loses-every-game-at-home (except the last one!) series with the Guardians, but in the end it was Cleveland's five-foot-eight, switch-hitting, chubby-cheeked no-doubt Hall-of-Famer José Ramirez who did them in, hitting a two-run home run on in the fourth inning on just a laughably, impossibly, insanely low pitch to have done anything at all with (that these two runs stood up is a great credit to the Guardians pitchers, who somehow struck out twenty-one batters [wild!]). I mean, just look at this thing:
On the one hand, great job, José, but on the other, let's be sure we're making good swing decisions up there, right, José? A ridiculous swing! On a curveball that, at the point of contact, was fewer than nine inches above the ground, but that, as the afore-linked video suggests, Ramirez had clearly been waiting on. "Oh my god," you could see White Sox pitcher Sean Burke say quietly to himself, standing in the rain, as the ball snuck out over the right-field fence. It didn't grab the attention an earlier Sean Burke postseason quote did—"This is my life. No family, no girl, no kids. This is all I do"—but it seemed at least as notable to me. The one I keep returning to, though, is something Burke said about a week ago: "I feel like I took all my friends together and made a baseball team." Because that's the dream, man; that's the dream.
Onwards, then, to the Championship Series! Both of them! Which are already lightly underway! The only other thing I wanted to mention for now is that I am totally convinced that the best (non-Dan Shulman) national baseball broadcaster these days is without question (to me) Brian Anderson, whose lovely cadence is softer than most, and whose mien and aspect are perfectly unobtrusive. One's thoughts turn to what Seamus Heaney said about the Robert Fitzgerald translation of The Odyssey: "there is no anxious straining after mighty effects, but rather a constant readiness for what the occasion demands, a kind of Odyssean adequacy to the task in hand, and this line-by-line vigilance builds up into a completely credible imagined world" (it's the second best thing anyone has ever said about poems, the first being Gwendolyn Brooks describing Richard Wright's haiku as "a clutch of strong flowers"). Anyway, totally like that, but for baseball, and that's Brian Anderson, to me. I understand his regular work is with the Brewers, not that he has been working their games here (TBS/TNT have the ALCS), but which is neat.
Okay then! Let's reconvene when there is a World Series all set to go, shall we? It won't be long now. Until then, enjoy!
KS
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