The Morning Horsehide Herald — the Twelfth of October, Two Thousand and Twenty-Six

Is it spring training yet? No — the pennants are being decided, and spring must wait its turn.

The Game of the Day

THE MIDNIGHT LESSON COMES DUE, AND THE BILL IS PRESENTED TO THE FINEST LEFT HAND IN THE LAND — TURANG, SCHOOLED IN AN EMPTY CAGE TWO NIGHTS PRIOR, CLOUTS SKUBAL THE OPPOSITE WAY; THE BOY LARA SINGLES HOME THE DIFFERENCE, AND FOUR RELIEVERS BAR THE DOOR ON THE CHAMPIONS: BREWERS 2, DODGERS 1 IN THE PENNANT OPENER

The duel the statisticians ranked among the three finest ever printed on an October card resolves into something homelier and better: Misiorowski, missing his best stuff, opens with 11 straight fastballs and grinds 13 outs from 94 pitches; Skubal retires nine of his first ten with six strikeouts and then cannot miss a bat again; Brice Turang — 2-for-16 in the Division round until a late-night tutorial with the hitting coach straightened his path — golfs a 2-0 sinker 384 feet into the home bullpen, Luis Lara pokes the go-ahead single at 21 years of age, and Milwaukee's bullpen, 19 2/3 October innings without an earned run and counting, hands the defending champions a 2-1 verdict in Game 1 of a Championship Series they swept a year ago

The decisive blow of the National League's pennant opener was struck two nights before the game began, in an empty batting cage under American Family Field. Brice Turang had carried a 2-for-16 Division Series home from the San Diego round, and a 1-for-15 from last October's Championship Series before that, so he stayed late at the park with the hitting coach Daniel Vogelbach to sand his swing back down to its essentials — hands tight, path straight, the ball driven back up the middle. "That's what he was working on, exactly," Pat Murphy would say afterward. "Instead of his hands dropping and cutting across, to just get straight to the baseball."⁶ On Sunday evening, before 42,617 at American Family Field, the homework was graded in public: Brewers 2, Dodgers 1, and the club that was swept out of this very round by this very opponent a year ago leads it, one game to none.

The advertised duel arrived imperfect and was the better theater for it. Jacob Misiorowski, the young ace who led all baseball in earned-run average this summer, confessed afterward he "didn't think I had my best stuff," and the evidence agreed — the Dodgers fouled off 21 of the 42 swings they took at him and made him labor 35 pitches through the second inning alone, where a walk to Shohei Ohtani and Andy Pages' single to right produced the visitors' lone run.⁴³ But the young man opened the night with 11 consecutive fastballs, the first at 102.3 miles the hour to Mookie Betts and the warmest at 104.0 to Freddie Freeman, and when the second inning stood bases loaded with one out he coaxed from Kiké Hernández the double play that ended it — Cooper Pratt with the clean pick at short, Turang with the pivot.⁴³ A disputed balk stretched his fourth; he answered by striking out Kyle Tucker. His final accounting — one run on five hits across four and a third innings, 94 pitches — was less a masterpiece than a load-bearing wall, raised by a pitcher who has thrown nearly 190 innings this year, "way over," his manager marvels, anything he had done before.⁴

Tarik Skubal, meanwhile, was for three innings everything his billing promised, retiring nine of the first ten Milwaukee men with six strikeouts. Then the lineup saw him a second time, and the spell broke with an audible snap: the Brewers swung and missed at better than half his offerings through three innings, and at precisely one pitch thereafter.⁵ In the fourth, Turang — who had just fouled a pitch off his own kneecap — got a 2-0 sinker in on the hands and did exactly what the midnight tutorial prescribed, staying inside the ball and driving it the opposite way, 384 feet to left-center into the home bullpen for the tie.⁶³ "I wasn't trying to hit a homer," the second baseman said. "I was trying to hit a nice line drive back up the middle." The pitcher tipped his cap — "in the zone, but it's in," Skubal allowed, "a good swing" — and then undid himself in the fifth by the oldest sin in the book, a leadoff walk to Garrett Mitchell. "The leadoff walk just can't happen," Skubal said plainly. Pratt bunted the runner along, and Luis Lara, the 21-year-old in right field, lined the first-pitch changeup he saw into center for the lead.⁵³ Skubal's five innings and 81 pitches made the shortest of his eight postseason starts.⁵

What remained was the machinery Milwaukee trusts most. DL Hall faced exactly one batter and got two outs for his trouble, inducing the double play that erased Betts in the fifth; Abner Uribe took the sixth, Aaron Ashby the seventh and eighth, and Trevor Megill the ninth, where he complicated matters with two walks before Betts drove a ball to the deepest part of center that Mitchell ran down at the warning track to end it.³⁴ The relief corps' October ledger now reads 19 2/3 innings without an earned run among Hall, Uribe, Ashby and Megill, a bullpen earned-run average of 0.38 through five games — tied for the third-lowest any club has carried through its first five postseason contests since 1969 — and opposing batsmen at a .163 figure.⁴ "We saw their four leverage guys tonight," Dave Roberts said, "and we just couldn't muster anything." His offense has two hits in 27 plate appearances with runners in scoring position this October, both of them Pages'.⁵ "At some point," said Betts, "we've got to get ours."³

The ledger notes what the evening portends. Every one of Milwaukee's five October games has been settled by one or two runs, and the two runs it scored Sunday are more than it managed in any single game of last autumn's Championship Series sweep.³⁷ History leans gently toward the winner: clubs taking Game 1 of a best-of-seven have claimed the series 127 times in 197 tries.³ But the champions' answer arrives with scarcely a pause — the second sitting is this very evening at five o'clock Eastern, Yoshinobu Yamamoto against the rookie Logan Henderson, and the account of that matchup is taken up elsewhere in this number.²

News Around the League

THE WAKING DESK: VOGT PROMISED AN ANSWER UPON RISING, AND THE ANSWER IS GRIFFIN — THE WELL-TRAVELED LEFT HAND, THREE YEARS IN JAPAN AND AN ALL-STAR AT LAST, OPENS THE PENNANT ROUND AGAINST RASMUSSEN AND THE RESTED RAYS AT EIGHT O'CLOCK TONIGHT

When Stephen Vogt was asked Saturday night, amid the champagne, who would pitch the Championship Series opener, he laughed that he would let the world know when he woke up. He woke, and the ball belongs to Foster Griffin. "It was a no-brainer to give the ball to Foster in Game 1," the manager said Sunday, and the pitcher called the assignment "a huge honor" before declining all sentiment: "I feel like there's still a job to be done."⁹

The choice is a story the deadball desks would have relished. Griffin returned to these shores only this season after three years' employment in Japan, made his first All-Star team, posted a 3.06 earned-run average across 22 starts for Washington, and crossed to Cleveland at the August trade deadline, where a single eight-run calamity against Baltimore inflated an otherwise respectable ledger — a 3.73 figure over his other eight starts, and seven strikeouts in 2 2/3 innings of Division Series relief since.⁹ The arithmetic behind the romance is colder: Parker Messick and Gavin Williams, the co-aces who spent everything in the five-game escape from Chicago, are not on regular rest until the second and third games, and the Rays batted a league-handsome .752 by on-base-plus-slugging against right-handed pitching this season but a .679 against left — 25th in the game. Cleveland sends the left hand.⁹

Opposite him at eight o'clock Eastern at Tropicana Field stands Drew Rasmussen, rested to the point of luxury, who carried a no-hitter into the eighth inning of his last start and who threw seven scoreless at this same Cleveland club in July, allowing one hit.⁸ The season series went 5-1 to Tampa Bay; the two clubs between them carry the sport's longest waits, Cleveland without a championship since 1948 and the Rays without one in their 28 years of existence — the matter this paper took up at length yesterday, and which begins settling itself tonight.⁸

THE REJOINDER DESK: NO REST FOR THE BEATEN — YAMAMOTO, WHO THREW NINE FULL INNINGS AT MILWAUKEE IN LAST YEAR'S ROUND, TAKES THE BALL AT FIVE O'CLOCK AGAINST A ROOKIE WHO HAS NEVER ONCE BEEN BATTERED

The champions' opportunity for redress arrives before the sting fades: Game 2 goes this evening at five o'clock Eastern in Milwaukee, and Los Angeles sends the surest thing October has lately known. Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the reigning World Series Most Valuable Player, carries a 2.14 postseason earned-run average and has won all but one of his 11 postseason starts; in this very fixture a year ago — Game 2 of the Championship Series, in this very ballpark — he threw the first complete game of his American career, and in the Division round just concluded he allowed Atlanta one run across seven innings.⁷

Milwaukee's answer is Logan Henderson, 24 years old, who has made 24 starts in the major leagues and never in any of them allowed more than three runs — and who, the Milwaukee faithful will note with relish, outdueled Tarik Skubal at Dodger Stadium in August over a career-high seven innings.⁷ The undercard of anxieties favors the home nine as well: Will Smith stands 1-for-19 this October with seven strikeouts, Ohtani bats lower in the order than the world is accustomed to seeing him, and the champions' timeliest hitting remains the property of Andy Pages alone.⁷

The statisticians append the grandest framing: this is only the 17th postseason meeting of two 100-win clubs, the sixth in a Championship round, and the National League has seen exactly one such series before — Philadelphia and Cincinnati, in 1976.⁷ The argument removes to Los Angeles for Wednesday's third game.²

THE INFIRMARY DESK: THE RAYS SHEATHE McCLANAHAN FOR THE WINTER — NOT HURT, SAYS CASH, MERELY SPENT, AND THE CLUB DECLINES TO SPEND HIM FURTHER

One subtraction from the American League card before it begins: Shane McClanahan will not pitch again this year. The left-hander has not worked since the 3rd of September, when forearm tightness ended a start against Texas, and Kevin Cash announced Sunday that the club has shut him down for the balance of the postseason — with the emphatic clarification that this is prudence, not calamity. "Shane is done for the season," the manager said. "He's a healthy pitcher."¹⁰

The caution is easily understood by anyone who has read the man's medical file: a second reconstruction of the elbow, then a nerve injury in the triceps that cost him 2025 under the knife, two and a half seasons surrendered to the arm before this year's return — 10 wins against 7, a 3.36 earned-run average, 106 strikeouts in 118 innings across 24 starts. His manager nominates him for the game's comeback laurels, an advocacy this paper records as advocacy, the ballots being months from counted.¹⁰ McClanahan remains with the club through October in the capacity Cash describes as "being the best teammate"; the Rays will prosecute the pennant round with the rotation that needed no asterisk — Rasmussen tonight, with Freddy Peralta, Nick Martinez, and one of Griffin Jax or Ian Seymour behind him.¹⁰

THE MARKET DESK: JAZZ CHISHOLM TAKES HIS ONE-AND-FORTY STOLEN BASES TO THE AUCTION HOUSE — THE WIRE SURVEYS THE BIDDERS, AND THE GULF BETWEEN ASKING AND APPRAISAL WOULD SWALLOW A FRANCHISE

The winter market stirs even as October plays on. The wire this weekend surveyed the free agency of Jazz Chisholm Jr., the Yankees' second baseman, who arrives at the auction a 29-year-old by next Opening Day, with a season of .231, 19 home runs, and a career-high 41 stolen bases, third-most in the American League, worth some three and a half wins above replacement by the modern accounting.¹¹ The survey names the Tigers, Blue Jays, Angels, Padres and Reds as plausible suitors, a return to the Bronx not excluded, and notes the strikeouts — 157 of them, a whiff rate in the game's bottom tier — that keep the appraisers' enthusiasm in check.¹¹

The arithmetic of the bargaining table is where the entertainment lies. An executive consulted by the wire projects three or four years at about $20 million per annum; the player's camp, by an earlier report the wire recalls, has floated eight to ten years at $35 million. The Herald, whose sympathies in matters of the purse are a matter of standing record, begrudges no workingman a bold opening price — the owners' side of these tables has never once undersold itself — and merely observes that between those two figures lies a winter's worth of negotiating, which this paper will follow with its customary interest.¹¹

October presents its first two-sitting evening of the pennant rounds: the National League's second game at five o'clock Eastern in Milwaukee, the American League's first at eight at Tampa Bay's dome — a reader with a wireless set and no other obligations may take in both, and this paper recommends the indulgence. Tuesday the American League argument continues at the dome at eight; Wednesday the National League's removes to Los Angeles.² Yesterday this desk counseled its readers to be seated early for Skubal against Misiorowski, and the counsel stands vindicated in an unexpected key — the finest pairing the card could print was decided not by either famous arm but by a second baseman's midnight homework and a bullpen that has yet to surrender an earned run all month. The game keeps its own counsel; that is why we keep buying tickets. Until the next dispatch, keep your scorecards near and your enthusiasms nearer.

~ THE HERALD ~

The Herald Acknowledges Its Debts

MLB Box Scores — Monday, October 12, 2026 — Boxscore
Baseball-Reference.com — Upcoming Schedule and Upcoming Dates — Baseball-Reference
AJ Cassavell, Brewers take Game 1 in NLCS rematch against defending champs — MLB.com
Adam McCalvy, Without best stuff, Miz grinds into the 5th, then Crew's lockdown 'pen takes over — MLB.com
Sonja Chen, With minimal support, Skubal loses steam 2nd time through in NLCS loss to Brewers — MLB.com
Zach Sweet, Late-night work pays off for 'baseball rat' Turang in Game 1 star turn — MLB.com
AJ Cassavell, Sonja Chen and Adam McCalvy, Dodgers-Brewers NLCS Game 2 FAQ (Mon., 5 ET, FOX/FS1) — MLB.com
Adam Berry and Tim Stebbins, Guardians-Rays ALCS Game 1 FAQ (Mon., 8 ET, TBS/HBO Max) — MLB.com
Tim Stebbins, Guardians tab well-traveled Griffin to open ALCS: 'It was a no-brainer' — MLB.com
Adam Berry, Notes: McClanahan (left forearm tightness) shut down for season — MLB.com
Mark Feinsand, Where could Jazz Chisholm Jr. land in free agency? — MLB.com