Developing A Reliever Has the Win in Seven of Milwaukee's Eight Playoff Games. The Market Just Made That Team a -170 Favourite for a Seven-Game Series

Shane Drohan started Game 4 of the National League Championship Series for Milwaukee on Thursday night and did not get out of the second inning. That was the plan. Dustin May came in, gave up a three-run homer to Shohei Ohtani on a 1-1 cutter, and the Dodgers led 4-0 at Dodger Stadium with Tyler Glasnow on the mound. Then May pitched a scoreless third and fourth, JoJo Romero pitched the fifth and sixth and retired Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman in order, and Aaron Ashby threw the last 39 pitches of the Dodgers' season. Brewers 6, Dodgers 4. Four games to none.

Milwaukee is in the World Series for the first time since 1982, when it was an American League team and lost in seven to St. Louis. It has never won a National League pennant until now. And it got there in a way no team has: per MLB.com's research, a reliever has been the winning pitcher in seven of the Brewers' eight postseason games, six of those games were comebacks, and the four-run deficit they erased Thursday is the largest ever overcome to clinch a league championship series. This is not a rotation that got hot. It is a bullpen being used as one.

Nine outs, four hitters you have heard of

Ashby entered in the seventh with the Brewers up 5-4 and a runner on third. He struck out Ohtani and got Betts to ground out. In the eighth, Will Smith doubled; Kyle Tucker flied out and Teoscar Hernández struck out. The ninth was clean, after David Hamilton, who hit four home runs in the regular season, took Edwin Díaz deep with two out for the insurance run. Jackson Chourio caught the last out on the left-centre warning track.

The save was the fifth of three or more innings in a series-clinching game since saves became official in 1969. The others belong to Vida Blue, Steve Howe, Madison Bumgarner and Lance McCullers Jr. Ashby has now thrown 12⅓ postseason innings without allowing a run. "I just kept telling Murph that I was good to go," he said. The six Milwaukee relievers combined for a 2.08 ERA across 21⅔ innings in the series, and three of them held Los Angeles scoreless over the final seven innings of the clincher. Pat Murphy's line afterwards was the one that will be on the T-shirts: "They may have a bunch of Hall of Famers, but we've got a bunch of gamers."

The Dodgers' own numbers explain the rest. Their starters allowed 13 earned runs in 18 innings, a 6.50 ERA; Yoshinobu Yamamoto's 2⅔ innings in Game 2 was the shortest postseason start of his career, and Blake Snell gave up three home runs in Game 3 after allowing none in his previous ten starts. The lineup hit .165 and went 5-for-43 with runners in scoring position. Ohtani's homer Thursday was his first since August 18 and the only one Los Angeles hit all series. Kyle Tucker, at .333/.419/.519, was the one hitter who produced, in the first year of a four-year, $240 million contract that had looked bad in September. The position group is the oldest in baseball at an average of 30.9. Max Muncy's verdict: "The train finally ran out of steam, I guess."

What the market did, and what it is pricing

We wrote on Tuesday that Monday night was the first day since March 25 that a World Series board had not had the Dodgers on top; BetMGM had Milwaukee +105 and Los Angeles +340 after Game 2, and Milwaukee had not been favoured in this market since 2011. By the time the series stood 3-0 the Brewers were -145 at DraftKings. On Friday morning, per Sports Illustrated, DraftKings had them -170 to win it all, which implies 62.96 percent, against Cleveland +330 and Tampa Bay +475. The Guardians led the Rays 2-1 in the ALCS as of Friday, with Game 4 delayed by rain in Cleveland.

A -170 favourite in a best-of-seven is a strong claim about roster quality, not about momentum. The honest reading of that price is that the market has decided Milwaukee is the better team than either American League survivor, and that the eight-game run has been evidence rather than noise. There is a real case for that: this was a team that had won 100 games by September 25 and took the National League's top seed, and the Dodgers it just swept were the team that swept it in this round last October, which no club had ever reversed in the same manner. The Bucks moved their October 23 home opener from 7 p.m. to 3 p.m. so the city can watch Game 1 at American Family Field that night, which tells you Milwaukee believes the price.

The strongest case against the price

The case against is the bullpen itself. A pen that has thrown 21⅔ innings in four games and been asked for nine outs from one man in the clincher is a pen that has been ridden, and it works because Murphy can stay with the hot hand on consecutive nights. The World Series does not start until Friday, October 23. That is a week between Ashby's last pitch and his next one. A reliever's edge is partly rhythm; a starter's is stamina. Milwaukee has chosen to make its relievers the former and nobody knows what seven days of rest does to it, because no team has reached this point this way.

There is also the regression case, which is boring and usually right. A 2.08 ERA over 21⅔ innings is a sample. The Dodgers' 5-for-43 with runners in scoring position is a sample. The first-pitch home run, the bases-loaded walk, the nine-hole hitter's homer off Díaz: these are events, and the market has priced them as traits. If the Guardians, who have won five of six, arrive with Gavin Williams striking out 45.9 percent of the hitters he faces, the Brewers will be facing a staff that does not give up the six-run comebacks that have defined their October. Six comebacks in eight games means six games in which Milwaukee trailed. A team that trails that often against Cleveland's pitching may not get its sixth inning.

We think the price is roughly right and the reasoning behind it is slightly wrong. Milwaukee should be favoured because it was the best team all year, not because of what happened this week. If the Brewers win Game 1 with a reliever credited again, the model survived the layoff and this piece's doubt was misplaced. If Murphy has to go to a starter for six innings in a game he is trailing, the market will find out what the Dodgers found out, which is that the thing that beat them was not a trick. It was a design, and designs have conditions.

Ohtani said Friday he "definitely" plans to pitch in 2027. Tarik Skubal, whom the Dodgers acquired at the deadline and lined up for a Game 5 that never came, is a free agent and said the obvious thing: "it's hard to win." Dave Roberts said "at the end of the day, we got beat." All three sentences are true. The fourth one, the one about what beat them, belongs to Trevor Megill, who was asked about Ashby's three innings and answered: "I guess that's what happens when a starter converts to a reliever, right? They go a long way."