By Adam Roberts – 9/28/2020
No days spent above .500? Constant offensive woes? No problem for the Brewers in a pandemic season!
The Brewers’ fate came down to the final day of the season and thanks to help from the Padres, they clinched the final wild card spot in the National League. Milwaukee had fallen to the Cardinals, who also clinched, 5-2 in St. Louis, but Milwaukee advanced to the postseason on a tiebreaker with the better in-division record after the San Francisco Giants lost their regular season finale.
Manager Craig Counsell believes, as you’d expect the skipper to, that the record isn’t an indication of the team’s right or lack thereof to be in the postseason. “It’s get in”, Counsell said afterwards. “The record’s kind of irrelevant for me, it’s get in. It was our job to get in, we did that. We’re in three years in a row, that’s special. You can slice it anyway you want, but that’s special.”
With the Crew clinching, the NL Central will have four, yes four, representatives in the National League playoffs; the Brewers will face the top-seeded Dodgers in Los Angeles in a three-game series starting Wednesday, while 3-seed Chicago gets 6-seed Miami, the aforementioned Cardinals will play in the 4-5 game against San Diego, and Cincinnati will be the 7-seed and take on Atlanta.
Of course, the last time the two teams met in the playoffs was 2018, a 4-3 NLCS victory for the Trolleydodgers. Naturally, national and even local media won’t give Milwaukee much of a chance this time around, but according to pitcher Brandon Woodruff, that’s just fine.
“Internally, we know that if we can just click at the right time, maybe we take this series and don’t look back.”, Woodruff commented. “That’s the great part of the playoffs; you saw it last year with Washington when they beat us and ended up winning the World Series”.
Coverage of Game One from L.A. begins at 8:45pm Wednesday evening on ESPN La Crosse 105.5!