MILWAUKEE -- As the National League Championship Series shifts to Los Angeles, both teams have reason to feel good -- and bad -- about what happened in Milwaukee.
Generally, I'm of the mind that what happens in Milwaukee, stays in Milwaukee, no matter what kind of cheese curd/bratwurst/pretzel/beer frenzy you've been on. But, after all, we're all professionals here, and it's important to the next few days that we make sense of the goings-on at Miller Park.
Let's play the glass half-full and half-empty game with the Brewers. You won a game! You're tied with the National League's tyrant and you need to take only one game at Chavez Ravine to bring the series back to the land of cheddar and lager. You staved off a Dodgers rally in Game 1, and came within one bad Jeremy Jeffress splitter of seizing both games. And you've done this without much help from MVP candidate Christian Yelich, who has been getting the Ted Williams treatment this postseason.
"I've seen just more foul balls," Brewers manager Craig Counsell said. "The couple of pitches he may have got to hit, he's fouled them off. Look, in games like this against pitchers like this, you don't expect to get a ton of pitches to hit."
Or maybe ... you have that sinking feeling. You won the first game, but were forced to hang on by the skin of your teeth after the back end of your bullpen nearly coughed up a five-run advantage. You also blew a lead in the second game because, again, your high-leverage relievers couldn't beat back a late L.A. push. That's the strength of your team, and it's looking a little puny. Your MVP front-runner has done precisely diddly-squat. How, then, are you possibly going to navigate three games in three days on enemy turf?