At 8:41 p.m. Saturday the Milwaukee Brewers had not yet batted and were losing 4-0. By 11:09 they had won the World Series game, and the city had completed its familiar monthly ritual of rehearsing its grief and then canceling it.
The Brewers beat the Tampa Bay Rays 5-4 to take a 2-0 lead in the championship, erasing the largest deficit ever overcome in a World Series game, or in any game, depending on how honestly a fan counts the parking lot.
The hole was dug before the lineup had seen a proper pitch — four runs in the first. The rally began in the fourth when a Tampa Bay ground ball found the space between a Rays infielder’s legs, a gap that had reportedly been open all season. David Hamilton’s grounder went through the same real estate. Sal Frelick fouled off three fastballs, waiting out the count like a man arguing with a drive-through speaker, and then hit a solo home run over the center-field fence — his first in three months — to tie it in the sixth. Cooper Pratt singled home the go-ahead run in the seventh. Then, and this is the part the consultants keep mentioning, Milwaukee allowed nothing for eight full innings.
The team is 9-1 this postseason, having trailed in eight of its nine wins. The lineup has a process, and the process is panic.
Dale Wyzenski, a season-ticket holder since 1997, said he now watches the first three innings from his basement with earplugs and a stew. “Not fear,” he insisted. “Filing. I make the stew, I do the dishes, and by the sixth the game is where I left it: interesting.”
The method has drawn interest from outside baseball. Human-resources consultants have begun pitching the model to hospitals and school districts. “You can’t schedule a comeback you never practiced,” said Bridgit Harroway, a Mequon consultant whose October is now booked into spring. “You have to be losing early, on purpose, by an amount nobody will defend on a slide. Then the late innings belong to you.”
Jackson Chourio finished the night with 19 career postseason runs batted in, the most in Brewers history, passing the man whose name was on every banner before this one. Chourio did not appear surprised. Rays reliever Ian Seymour, who served Frelick the home run after three fouled fastballs, said the scouting report was simple: throw the fastball. “He fouled off three of them,” Seymour said. “You can’t argue with a guy who’s right about the pitch and wrong about letting me throw it four times.”
The Rays, who scored four before Milwaukee’s batters had untaped their bats, have learned the postseason arithmetic: a lead in October is a rumor. The series moves to Tampa Bay on Monday. The Brewers lead it two games to none, and they have not once been ahead after one inning, and they would like everyone to stop noticing.