Yes, root for the Brewers. It isn't close, and you don't need to dress it up as charity.
Start with what happened Monday night at American Family Field. The Dodgers grabbed the lead three times in the first six innings. Three times Milwaukee took it right back in the bottom half of that same inning, and the Brewers walked off with a 7-4 win and a 2-0 series lead heading to Los Angeles for Game 3 on Wednesday. William Contreras tied it with a homer in the fifth, then singled home the go-ahead run an inning later. He finished 3 for 4. His three hits matched the entire Dodgers lineup, which went 3-for-28.
The go-ahead run came after Los Angeles chose to intentionally walk Brice Turang to pitch to Contreras. It backfired in the most predictable way possible. That's the kind of plan that works until it meets a hitter who's locked in, and Contreras was.
The roster construction is the real problem for anyone still buying into the mighty Dodgers. This is a team that treats every rival's best starter as a July shopping item. They traded for Tarik Skubal at the deadline, a two-time reigning American League Cy Young winner, and sent Detroit a package of prospects to get him. They already had Yoshinobu Yamamoto. In Game 1, Milwaukee outlasted Skubal. In Game 2, Yamamoto got chased after recording just eight outs, the shortest postseason start of his career. Dave Roberts shrugged and said, "He just didn't have it tonight." Mookie Betts put it better: "I think everybody's so used to him being a robot that if he didn't go eight innings, no hits, whatever, it wasn't Yamamoto."
So the two-time defending champions have now lost with two different aces on the mound, and through two games no starter on either side has gone more than five innings. The Dodgers have gotten 7 2/3 innings total out of their rotation. Buying the arms doesn't guarantee they all show up when it counts in October.
Pat Murphy wants that understood. Milwaukee won a major-league-best 103 games this season, the best in franchise history, three more than the Dodgers, and did it while holding home-field advantage in this series. They just beat a Padres team that was among the best in baseball after the break. Murphy is done pretending otherwise. "I'm sorry I played that underdog card," he said, remembering what leaning on that line got Milwaukee last year. He's right to be annoyed: "There's not one of you out there that predicted us to win over 81 games this year... So when that happens, who are we?"
That's why the "good guys" framing lands. The resource gap is real, and the Brewers' own players lean on it. David Hamilton described their identity as "college baseball. Bunt 'em over, move 'em, sac fly, get 'em in." It comes down to which version of baseball you want to see win. One team buys every available ace and waits for the math to work. The other grinds out longer at-bats and lets a bullpen drag it across the line. When the second one is up 2-0, that's the sport correcting itself, and it's fun to watch.
Blame the front office. It scooped up a two-time Cy Young winner on top of an already loaded roster and manufactured exactly the resentment now pointed at it, right down to the stories about its own fans heading for the exits early this October. You reap what you stack.
One caveat: a 2-0 lead doesn't decide anything. Game 3 is Wednesday in Los Angeles. A lineup this talented is going to wake up eventually, and teams have come back from 0-2 before. Last year the Dodgers walked into Milwaukee and swept the series, with the Brewers hitting .118. Nobody should crown anyone until at least Wednesday night.
The question here is who you should want to win. Until the Dodgers prove the checkbook still plays in October, the team that won more games and is outworking them deserves the pull. Milwaukee doesn't need your pity. They've earned the right to embarrass the idea that a title is something you can just purchase.
