Andrew Friedman stood in a soaked clubhouse, beers wedged upside-down in his shirt by Tanner Scott, Alex Freeland pouring one into his face, and when someone asked which team he'd rather see next, he grinned and said, "I just want chaos." That's the posture of a man who isn't worried about the Brewers. He shouldn't be.
Milwaukee makes this a real series this time. They still don't win it.
Start with what's true and what Milwaukee earned. The Brewers won 103 games this year, the best record in the sport, and they'll host Games 1, 2, 6 and 7 at American Family Field with the NLCS starting Sunday night. For the first time in 50 years the round features a pair of 100-win teams, the 103-win Brewers against the 100-win Dodgers. This is a very good baseball team that took care of San Diego in four games to get here. Pat Murphy isn't selling his group short, either. "We're gonna be more ready than we were last time, I believe," he said, before adding, "We have a monumental task ahead of us... There's like an All-Star at every position. But you know what? Teams win."
The problem with "teams win" is simple. Pitching swept the Brewers last October. Effort and chemistry had nothing to do with it. The Dodgers gave up four runs across the entire series, one per game. Milwaukee hit .118, the lowest team average any club has ever posted in a postseason series of at least three games. Shohei Ohtani closed it out in Game 4 with three home runs, six scoreless innings and ten strikeouts, and Mookie Betts stood on the field afterward and compared it to being the Chicago Bulls playing Michael Jordan. That's not a gap you close with home-field and a better regular season.
And about that better regular season: last year the Brewers swept the season series against the Dodgers 6-0, the first NL team to sweep them in a regular-season set since the 2006 Cardinals. Then October arrived and it meant exactly nothing. Ninety-game samples get thrown out the window when L.A. shortens its rotation and starts handing the ball to its best arms on full rest. Best record in baseball looks great on a banner. Pitching decided this matchup.
Milwaukee should be scared of something else: the Dodgers spent the summer widening the exact gap that buried them a year ago. At the deadline they added Tarik Skubal, a two-time AL Cy Young winner, onto a staff that already had Yamamoto, Snell and Glasnow, with Ohtani as a two-way weapon on top of that. Skubal takes Game 1, Yamamoto goes Game 2. The one area that cost Milwaukee the series last year is exactly the one L.A. made stronger.
There's a real counter here: the Dodgers' offense has looked like it's pressing, and a lineup that leans this hard on the home run can go cold for a week in October. If that happens, a 103-win team with a rising young rotation and a crowd behind it can steal games. They'll probably take one in Milwaukee, maybe two, the kind of series last fall never gave us.
But stealing games and winning four is a different thing, and the people responsible for that difference are sitting in the Dodgers' front office, the ones who looked at a sweep and decided to go get another ace anyway. Friedman asked for chaos because he knows his roster survives it. Milwaukee will make him sweat this time. He still ends up back in the World Series.
