Forget the final score for a second. The real story out of Citi Field on Thursday is that Jackson Chourio has stopped being a nice young piece on a good roster and started being the reason the Brewers win baseball games.
Milwaukee took the rubber match 8-2, and Chourio was in the middle of each of the club's first three run-scoring rallies. He opened the game by singling on Manaea's first pitch, then kept moving: advanced on a walk, came around to score on a Vaughn single, dictating the pace of a game from the batter's box before most fans had found their seats.
It wasn't a one-night thing, either. Milwaukee took two of three from the Mets in this series, and Chourio's fingerprints were all over that too, including a two-homer game earlier in the set. String those together and you get a player who's shifted from talented young outfielder to the guy opposing pitchers have to game-plan around first. One series doesn't settle anything with five weeks left in the season, but anyone who watched these three games saw a guy playing with more conviction than the rest of his lineup.
The flip side belongs to Manaea, who gave up six runs and eight hits in 5 2/3 innings. That's not a disaster start on its own, but it's the kind of outing that turns a competitive series into a laugher, especially once Milwaukee tacked on another run when Lara scored after Sanchez beat out what looked like a potential double-play grounder. Little things kept breaking Milwaukee's way, which tends to happen when a team is playing loose and an opponent's rotation is under strain.
Jacob Misiorowski gave Milwaukee six sharp innings on the other side of the ball, and that should worry the Mets more than anything in the box score. A lineup that's scuffling can be explained away as a bad week. A lineup that's scuffling against a pitcher working with that kind of command starts to look like a pattern.
This series was a glimpse of what Milwaukee looks like when its young core plays up to its ceiling at the same time its pitching does its job. Chourio is the name to watch the rest of the way. If he keeps setting the table like he did this week, the Brewers won't need much from anyone else on nights like Thursday's.
For the Mets, one bad loss isn't the problem. A rotation piece getting knocked around and a lineup going quiet happened in the same game, in a series they lost two of three. That's the kind of week you shrug off in May. This late in the season, it's the kind of week that shows up on a ledger somewhere in October's math.
