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The two best records in the National League have spent three days in the same building, and the third game hands the ball to the pitcher with the lowest WHIP in baseball. Jacob Misiorowski has struck out 204 hitters and allowed 133 innings worth of almost nothing. The lineup waiting for him scores nearly five runs a game and just beat Milwaukee 3-1.
Brewers vs Dodgers
Milwaukee sits at 75-48, the best record in the National League, built on a 41-22 mark at American Family Field and a 34-26 record everywhere else. Los Angeles is 74-49, one game behind for the league lead and eight games clear of San Diego in the West, with a 37-24 home record and an almost identical 37-25 away from Chavez Ravine. Neither club has been especially hot lately. Both are 5-5 in their last ten, which is what happens when two teams this good spend August playing each other and the Cubs and the Padres.
The gap in how they got here is more interesting than the one game between them. Milwaukee has the second-stingiest staff of any team playing Saturday at a 3.53 team ERA, with 1,196 strikeouts and a .220 average against, and an offense that walks more than anybody in baseball. The Brewers have drawn 516 walks and hit only 111 home runs. Los Angeles inverts it: 158 home runs, a .766 team OPS, 4.98 runs a game, and a 3.69 staff ERA that would lead most divisions and finishes second in this series.
Thursday belonged to Milwaukee by a run, 5-4. Friday belonged to Los Angeles by two, 3-1. Nine runs, then four. Two games decided by a combined three runs between clubs that have played fifteen innings of close baseball in forty-eight hours, and the Dodgers now lead the regular-season series 3-2 with the earlier May meetings included. Milwaukee took the opener of that May set 5-1 in Milwaukee before Los Angeles answered 11-3 and 5-1.
Friday's version is the one worth remembering. Milwaukee scored once. The Brewers have now scored three runs or fewer in four of their last six games, a stretch covering 2, 3, 5 and 1 runs on the road trip through San Diego and Los Angeles. For a club that manufactures offense out of walks and contact rather than power, a road trip against two of the better pitching staffs in the league is exactly where that engine stalls.
Milwaukee Brewers Los Angeles DodgersJacob Misiorowski's season does not have a comparison on this slate. He is 11-5 with a 1.76 ERA and a 0.74 WHIP, with 204 strikeouts and 30 walks across 133 innings in 22 starts, and opposing hitters are batting .147 against him. That average is the number that keeps stopping people. Two hundred and four strikeouts at 13.80 per nine innings, thirteen home runs allowed all season, and a road ERA of 1.78 that is indistinguishable from his 1.75 at home.
He has already faced this lineup once and won the exchange. On August 2 he threw seven innings against Los Angeles, allowed two runs on two hits, walked one and struck out ten. A week earlier, on July 26, he struck out twelve Rockies over five innings while giving up a single hit. His last time out, August 9 against Minnesota, he went six innings with three earned and nine strikeouts, which counts as a rough night by his standards.
Justin Wrobleski's record reads better than his August. He is 11-4 with a 3.44 ERA, a 1.11 WHIP and 94 strikeouts against 27 walks in 120.1 innings, numbers that make him a legitimate mid-rotation starter for a contender. The trouble is recent and specific: ten earned runs across his last two starts, seven of them in four and a third innings against the Cubs on August 3 and three more in three and a third against Arizona on August 9. Seventeen home runs allowed in 120 innings is the underlying issue, and Milwaukee's lineup is the wrong one to test it against, since the Brewers rarely swing for the seats and instead put runners on base by the dozen.
Two clubs with identical 1.16 team WHIPs and a 0.16 gap in staff ERA are, on the mound, the same team. The separation lives in how they score. Los Angeles has 47 more home runs and a 37-point edge in team OPS. Milwaukee has 58 more walks and a lineup that has scored 4.86 a game with the eighth-fewest home runs in baseball. One of the odder wrinkles in the profile is the Dodgers' home split: they score 4.43 runs a game at Dodger Stadium against 5.53 on the road, with a .742 home OPS versus .787 away. Whatever advantage they hold Saturday night, it has not historically shown up on the scoreboard in their own ballpark.
Brewers Keys Dodgers KeysThe game total sits at 7.5, which is the lowest number on a fifteen-game Saturday board that otherwise runs from 7.5 to 9.5. Both team totals are set at 3.5, and the pricing tells you where the market's confidence sits: the Dodgers under 3.5 is a -140 favorite while the Brewers under 3.5 sits at +110. The book is saying Milwaukee is the more likely side to score four or more, which is a strange sentence to write about a team that scored once on Friday and has 47 fewer home runs, and it reflects exactly how much respect Misiorowski's start commands.
Historical scoring in this series backs the low number. The first two games of the weekend produced nine and four runs. The May set in Milwaukee produced six, fourteen and six. Across five regular-season meetings the average is 7.8 runs, sitting almost exactly on Saturday's total, and the one blowout in the set came against a starter neither team is using tonight.
Saturday night baseball on FOX gets the version of this matchup it wanted: first place in the National League decided between two clubs separated by a single game, with the sport's most unhittable starter on one side and its deepest lineup on the other. Milwaukee's case is simple and rests almost entirely on one man. Misiorowski has allowed a .147 average across 22 starts and already held this lineup to two runs over seven innings two weeks ago, and behind him sits a 3.53 staff ERA and a bullpen with 39 saves.
Los Angeles has the wider set of answers and the more obvious problem. The Dodgers have Ohtani, Freeman, Muncy and Pages, they have won three of the last four meetings between these clubs, and they hit .260 as a team. They also have to survive a starter who has been chased twice in a row, and a home ballpark where their own offense has been a run per game worse all season. The number the whole night hinges on is not a record or a total, it is 0.74, and whether the Dodgers become the first lineup all year to make it look ordinary.