This one belongs to Pat Murphy. No talk about a bullpen "off night" changes that. The Brewers were three outs from sweeping the World Series and winning the first title in franchise history, and their manager ran the 12th inning like the championship could wait until tomorrow. It couldn't, and now it has to. Tampa Bay walked off Game 4, 4-3, in twelve innings, and the series sits at 3-1 with Game 5 set for Wednesday night at Tropicana Field.
Start with the arm he took out of the game. Aaron Ashby was untouchable: seven up, seven down across the ninth, tenth and eleventh on a tidy 31 pitches, stretching his October relief work to eighteen straight scoreless innings. A reliever locked in like that, that economical, with a ring one frame away, should stay in the game. Murphy pulled him anyway. He also used his closer, Trevor Megill, for a grand total of one out and five pitches, then put him away too. Having burned through his two best late-inning options, he handed the twelfth to Shane Drohan, a rookie left-hander making his first appearance since the middle of October.
Drohan got routed. Four straight hits, the tying run scoring on a Jonny DeLuca single, the game ending on a Ben Williamson chopper over first base. You can pile blame on Drohan if you want, and plenty have, but a pitcher only gets handed a moment like that if a manager decides to hand it to him. Murphy's explanation was that he liked the matchup: "We thought Drohan could come in and face the lefties there. It seems like the ball was up a little bit." The ball was up, and so was a World Series, and the man who picked the pitcher throwing it wants to talk about location.
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Jacob Misiorowski never moved. Milwaukee's ace sat in reserve and never so much as warmed up, by Murphy's own admission, because he was being saved for Game 5. Murphy protected an arm for a potential Game 5 while his team stood one inning from making Game 5 disappear. That's hedging in the exact spot where a manager is supposed to empty the tank. Win the game in front of you and there's no tomorrow to worry about. Instead he insured himself against a loss and then lost anyway.
The case for all this is that burning your closer and your ace for scraps in a single extra-innings game is bad long-term bullpen math, and that saving Misiorowski keeps Milwaukee stronger the rest of the way. Fine in April. In the twelfth inning of a game that ends the World Series if you win it, there is no long term. The whole point of a 3-0 lead is that you get to be reckless with it. Murphy had the lead that lets a manager spend everything, and he spent nothing.
The luck didn't help, either. Joey Ortiz's throwing error on the leadoff grounder in the bottom of the twelfth opened the door, and Williamson, who'd been scuffling all postseason, found the one soft spot on the infield. Those are the breaks that turn a clean inning into a nightmare, and they're exactly why you put your most trusted arms out there, so a bad bounce has as little room to hurt you as possible. Murphy did the opposite. He widened the margin for disaster and then got bitten by it.
There's a version of this where the Brewers close it out Wednesday and none of this matters, and the odds still favor a team up 3-1. Tampa Bay became just the fifth club in World Series history to fall behind 3-0 and win Game 4, and the four before them all lost Game 5. Milwaukee will probably be fine.
But having a sweep by the throat demands better than "probably fine." Murphy had better arms and chose not to use them, to keep an ace fresh for a game that, three outs earlier, didn't need to be played. He let himself down.
