The loudest Milwaukee Brewers news of the week is also the ugliest baseball I have seen all season: the Brewers hung 22-0 on the Mariners, and by the end Seattle was running a pitcher out there with a 63.00 ERA and an outfielder gifting runs like it was a Sunday rec league. Games like that do not just disappear into the standings. They leave a mark on a clubhouse.
And it landed in a week where the sport seemed determined to break every one of its own systems at once. An MVP race that has stopped making sense. A replay center that could not answer a question a bleacher creature could answer. A general manager shown the door in August. Baseball in late summer, doing what it does.
What happened in the Brewers 22-0 win over the Mariners
Twenty-two to nothing is not a baseball score. It is a weather event. The full text of it tells you everything: Seattle emptied the tank, the position players and the emergency arms took over, and Milwaukee just kept swinging. The part that should worry the Pacific Northwest is not the crooked number, it is the timing. This is a club whose collapse may have just cost them the playoff spot they spent five months holding, and Cal Raleigh's season has gone from bad to the kind of bad people write columns about. He is a good player having a rough year in the worst possible month. I am not going to enjoy that part.
checked the almanac: 22-0 is the number cleveland hung on the yankees in the bronx back in august 2004, and the pirates put the same score on the cubs at wrigley in 1975. it is the far edge of the map. seattle just got there.
| The number | What it was |
|---|---|
| 22-0 | Brewers over Mariners, final |
| 63.00 | ERA of the pitcher who finished it for Seattle |
| 4-1 | Brewers over the Dodgers in Los Angeles |
| 22 | Age of Jacob Misiorowski, who said the quiet part out loud |
That last row is the real Milwaukee story. After beating the Dodgers 4-1 in Los Angeles, the 22-year-old rookie told a national interview, "Year after year, we're right there with them. We're competing. I think we're a team to be reckoned with." Mookie Betts reportedly shrugged. Of course he did. But a kid that age saying it into a camera in Chavez Ravine is a tell about how this Brewers room actually feels, and Milwaukee has spent a decade being the team nobody wants in October and everybody underestimates in August.
Why did the Pete Alonso home run replay call stand?
This is the one that should embarrass the league. We have a system that can measure a quarter inch on a pitch at the black, and it could not resolve whether Pete Alonso's go-ahead home run was fair or foul. The replay official punted. The call on the field stood. Fans went home wondering what exactly all that equipment is for if it goes quiet on the one swing that decided a ballgame.
I love replay when it fixes things. I have very little patience for replay that shrugs. The Mets host Milwaukee tonight, which means Alonso and the Brewers get another look at each other while that one is still fresh.
What comes next for the Yankees, Astros, and the wild card race
New York is patching its roster with what is available, which right now means Nestor Cortes coming over from the Phillies and Eli Morgan from the minor league pile. That is what a contender in August looks like when it is out of prettier options, and the Yankees host Houston tonight to find out how well the patch holds.
Houston, meanwhile, pulled the plug on GM Dana Brown with his contract set to expire after the season. That is a fire-and-replace, and a front office that will not wait until October to make it is a front office telling you exactly how it feels about the direction of things.
Add Shohei Ohtani's arm still sitting as a question mark, Pete Crow-Armstrong crashing the NL MVP conversation on style points as much as WAR, and Bo Bichette's opt-out looming as a winter story nobody has the terms on yet, and you have a sport with more open threads than a September rotation.
What I am watching next: whether Seattle answers on the field or lets that 22-0 sit in the room, and whether the league says a word about the replay call it declined to make.