Developing The Dodgers Have Four Runs in Two Games and Not One of Them Came On a Hit. The Market Took Until Monday Night to Notice

Four runs in two games, and the Dodgers have not driven in any of them with a base hit.

That is not a figure of speech. In Milwaukee's 7-4 win at American Family Field on Monday night, Los Angeles scored twice in the fifth when Kyle Tucker doubled to lead off, Tommy Edman bunted him to third, Logan Henderson threw the ball away at first to let Tucker in and Edman to second, and Freddie Freeman lifted a sacrifice fly. Sacrifice flies and errant throws. Los Angeles went 0-for-4 with runners in scoring position. For the series, the number is 2-for-26.

Henderson, Milwaukee's starter, made two errors on the night — matching his entire previous career total — and gave up four runs of which only two were earned. He was still the winning pitcher's teammate when it mattered, because the Brewers' bullpen came in and retired the last fifteen Dodgers in order. Dustin May, JoJo Romero, Abner Uribe, Aaron Ashby. Five innings, fifteen outs, zero baserunners.

The number that is actually the story is not Yamamoto's

Yoshinobu Yamamoto got nine outs. He walked two, gave up four hits and three earned runs, and left after 2⅔ innings, the shortest postseason start of his career against a prior postseason ERA of 2.14 across eleven appearances. Every column written Tuesday morning will be about that, because an ace getting chased in the third inning of a championship series is the loudest thing that happened.

It is also the least repeatable thing that happened. Yamamoto has eleven postseason appearances that say otherwise and one that does not. If the Dodgers' problem were Yamamoto, the Dodgers would not have a problem, because he is not scheduled to pitch again until Game 6.

The problem is that this lineup has produced two run-scoring hits in two games. William Contreras, by himself, produced three runs in one night — a single off Yamamoto in the first, a 436-foot home run off Kris Bubic in the fifth, a single off Brock Stewart in the sixth. Three pitchers, three innings, three runs batted in, 3-for-4 with a walk. The gap between what Contreras did alone and what the Dodgers have done in two games is the series so far.

We said something close to the opposite on October 9, and it is worth saying so here rather than letting it sit in an archive. Our NLCS preview argued that Milwaukee's problem was its offence and that the Brewers would need to outhit a Dodgers lineup they could not match. Through two games Milwaukee has 12 hits to Los Angeles's 3 in Game 2 alone, and the dependency ran the other direction entirely. That was a bad read and the games have said so twice.

The market moved, and this time it moved on the right variable

Futures boards are usually a lagging indicator dressed up as a leading one. This one was not.

The Dodgers opened the season on March 25 at +225 to win the World Series, the shortest price on the board by a distance, with Milwaukee at +3000. They held the top line through a 162-game season, through a division series, through every injury and every slump, and through Game 1 of this series — after which the two sides sat essentially level at +175 and +180. Monday night was the first time all year that a sportsbook's World Series board did not have Los Angeles on top. BetMGM's post-game number: Brewers +105, an implied 48.8 percent, against Dodgers +340. On the series itself, Milwaukee -300 and Los Angeles +240.

Per Sports Odds History, cited by Covers, it is the first time Milwaukee has been favoured in this market since 2011.

What makes that interesting is not that the price moved — a 2-0 lead in a seven-game series moves prices mechanically, and you can compute most of the shift from the series state alone. It is that the price moved past the point the series state justifies. A team down 0-2 in a best-of-seven with three of the remaining five at home is not a 29.4 percent proposition on structure. The market is pricing something about this Dodgers lineup, and the only new information it has is 2-for-26.

There is a reasonable objection: 26 plate appearances is nothing. It is less than two innings' worth of opportunity spread over two games, and the Dodgers' true-talent rate with runners in scoring position is not 7.7 percent, it is somewhere north of .250 and everybody knows it. Regression is real and it is the whole argument for buying Los Angeles at +340.

We think that objection is right about the sample and wrong about the mechanism. The question is not whether this lineup is a 2-for-26 lineup. It is what has been done to it. Milwaukee's bullpen has now thrown four scoreless innings in Game 1 and five in Game 2 — nine innings, and the last fifteen outs of Monday without a baserunner. That is not variance in the Dodgers' contact quality. That is a pitching staff built for exactly this, deployed exactly this way, two nights running, and it will be available again on Wednesday.

What Wednesday actually asks

Milwaukee gives the ball to Robert Gasser, 5-5 with a 3.87 ERA, which is the softest start the Brewers will offer in this series and the clearest invitation the Dodgers will get. Freeman's post-game line was the correct one and also the only one available: "They know they've got a lot on their hands, too. We've just got to go out on Wednesday and play better."

Three home games. A rotation that still has its best starts in front of it. A lineup that has been this good for three years and bad for two nights. If Los Angeles scores five runs on Wednesday with a hit involved, none of this holds up and the futures board will snap back inside an hour.

What would make it hold up is the thing nobody in that clubhouse can fix between now and first pitch: Milwaukee has not needed its offence to be good. It has needed Contreras to be good and the bullpen to be unhittable, and it has gotten both. The Brewers are chasing their first World Series appearance since 1982. The Dodgers are chasing a third consecutive title that no National League team has ever won. One of those is now a 75 percent proposition, and it is not the one that was +3000 in March.

One discrepancy we could not resolve. ESPN's recap credits Freddie Freeman with a sixth-inning error on a pickoff attempt that allowed Milwaukee's go-ahead run to score. NBC Sports and Yahoo both have the go-ahead run scoring on Contreras's single off Brock Stewart, and locate the pickoff error in the third inning with Henderson throwing it. We have gone with the two accounts that agree and named the third rather than smoothing it over.