MILWAUKEE -- The Milwaukee Brewers won Game 1 of the World Series, 3-2, Friday night at American Family Field. It was their first win since Thursday, Oct. 15. They hadn't lost since then either, though; they had been off.
Any time a team has a long layoff in the postseason, we end up hearing the same tired song and dance. Rest" is the succinct headline. The basic argument is that with baseball being a daily sport in the regular season, teams sitting around for multiple days between series -- or between the end of the regular season and the divisional series -- are at some sort of disadvantage because they'll come out rusty.
One example obviously doesn't disprove a theory -- though we have several more and we'll get to those -- but the Brewers are doing their best to kill that narrative. In the first inning of World Series Game 1 on Friday, Jackson Chourio led off with a single. Christian Yelich tripled him home and then scored on a William Contreras single.
In the span of four batters, the team that spent seven full days without playing a game just scored two runs. Nick Martinez, on the mound for the Rays, wasn't great in the second half, but he was an All-Star this season and was coming off an outing in which he allowed only one run in more than five innings against the Guardians in the ALCS. After that RBI single in the first, he threw out two runners trying to steal and nailed both of his ABS challenges.
It sure seems like a rusty catcher wouldn't be so excellent behind the plate at judging balls and strikes. "Contreras was unbelievable," Brewers manager Pat Murphy said after the game. "The two caught stealings, the ABS, the hits, calling the game.
Now, we did not play great. You can look back and we made a baserunning mistake, we made an execution mistake. We made a defensive mistake.
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