The Milwaukee Brewers won a game Sunday that shows exactly how a team gets to 55-33 without anyone noticing: a spot starter kept it close, one swing flipped it, and the bullpen did the rest. Milwaukee beat the Arizona Diamondbacks 3-2 at Chase Field to take the series two games to one.
Milwaukee trailed from the first inning, when Corbin Carroll doubled home Geraldo Perdomo against Brandon Sproat. Sproat wobbled but held from there — four innings, one run, five hits, three walks on 92 pitches — which is roughly the job description for a fill-in start on the road.
The game turned in the seventh against Eduardo Rodriguez, who had otherwise handled Milwaukee all afternoon. Jake Bauers hit a two-run homer to right-center — his 16th of the season, scoring Sal Frelick — and Joey Ortiz followed with an RBI single to make it 3-1. Bauers now has 54 RBI, quietly one of the better returns on any roster spot in the division.
Then came the part of the box score this desk reads first. Five relievers — Aaron Ashby, Abner Uribe, Grant Anderson, Drew Rom and Trevor Megill — covered the final five innings and allowed one run, Arizona’s force-out rally in the seventh charged to Ashby. Rom picked up the win, and Megill worked around a walk in the ninth for his 13th save. A closed roof, no wind, no drama beyond the manageable kind.
At 55-33, the Brewers own the NL Central by six games over the Cubs and the second-best record in the National League behind the Dodgers, and they’ve built it largely on nights like this — the margin for a team without a superstar payroll is a bullpen that turns 3-2 leads into wins. The test sharpens immediately: Milwaukee opens a series at third-place St. Louis on Monday night.
