Brewers Erase Two-Run Deficit, Rout Cubs 9-5 Behind Chourio
Milwaukee trailed 5-3 heading into the fourth inning and still won by four. Jackson Chourio went 4-for-6 with a home run and scored twice, and the Brewers' lineup kept grinding until Chicago had nothing left to give.
The first two innings of this game were a mess in the best possible way. Milwaukee struck first, pushing across two runs in the opening frame on an RBI single by Lara and a walk that forced in Contreras. Alex Bregman answered immediately — a 389-foot blast to left center that scored Crow-Armstrong and knotted it at 2. Chourio put the Brewers back in front with a 390-foot shot to right center in the second, but Chicago wasn't done. A Taylor single scored Shaw to tie it again, and then Bregman delivered the biggest swing of the night: a single to center that scored both Crow-Armstrong and Taylor, pushing the Cubs to a 5-3 lead. That hit swung Chicago's win probability from 51% to 70% — a 19-point jump that looked, at the time, like it might be the dagger.
It wasn't. Jacob Misiorowski had already done enough damage for Milwaukee, surrendering all five earned runs on five hits and four walks across four innings. But the Brewers' offense had other ideas. In the fourth, a Turang sacrifice bunt scored Pratt, a Vaughn single scored Chourio, and a Contreras single scored Turang — three runs on three plays, all with two outs or less, all in a row. Just like that, Milwaukee had a 6-5 lead and Chicago's momentum was gone. The story of the night was how efficiently the Brewers dismantled that two-run deficit without a single extra-base hit in the inning.
From there, Milwaukee's bullpen — Trevor Megill in particular, with two strikeouts across a scoreless inning — kept Chicago off the board while the offense added insurance. Pratt singled home Yelich in the seventh to make it 7-5, and Joey Ortiz put the game away in the ninth with a single to left that scored both Lara and Yelich, pushing the final to 9-5. Ortiz finished 1-for-4 with 2 RBI. Bregman's night — 2-for-4, a homer, and 4 RBI — looks like the best individual performance on the field, but it came on the losing side, which appears to be the cruelest kind of box score. Milwaukee's lineup was simply too deep and too relentless to let a two-run deficit stand.