THE MORNING HORSEHIDE HERALD

The Game of the Day

THREE OUTS FROM THE FIRST TITLE IN MILWAUKEE'S HISTORY, AND TAMPA BAY TEARS THE PAGE OUT — RAYS 4, BREWERS 3 IN THE TWELFTH, AND THE BROOM GOES BACK IN THE CLOSET

Pratt's Fourth Hit Is a Homer That Stands Half an Inning as the Championship Stroke; a Bounced Throw, Four Singles and the Season Is Saved; Ashby Runs His Spotless October to Eighteen Innings and Past Andrew Miller's Mark; Only the 1910 Cubs Ever Won in the Last At-Bat With a Sweep Overhead

Milwaukee stood three outs from the first championship in its history, and the man who had seemingly delivered it was a rookie of 22. Cooper Pratt — whose error-and-atonement these columns chronicled Sunday — led off the twelfth against Ian Seymour with his fourth hit of the night, a drive into the left-center seats that broke a tie standing since the fifth inning. His final line read 4-for-5 with a double besides, the finest evening of his young October life. Half an inning later the blow was a footnote.

The unmaking began, as so much of this Series has, with a throw. Joey Ortiz fielded Junior Caminero's leadoff grounder at third and bounced his long peg off Jake Bauers' glove, and the Rays' third baseman was aboard — limping, of which more below. Shane Drohan, a rookie left-hander summoned from the bullpen, never recorded an out: Liam Hicks ground a single through the left side, Caminero hobbling to third; Jonny DeLuca's single up the middle scored Cedric Mullins, running for the wounded man, to square it; Chandler Simpson's third hit of the night filled the bases; and Ben Williamson, sent up to pinch-hit, chopped a bounder into right field to score Nick Fortes with the run that ended it — 4-3, after four hours and twenty minutes, before 40,514 under the closed roof. "We pieced together a big inning," said the Tampa Bay manager Kevin Cash, "maybe the most important inning of our season."³

The eleven innings before had been the tight, low-scoring kind this Series keeps producing. Simpson doubled home DeLuca in the second; Pratt doubled home Sal Frelick in the fourth; Caminero crossed with the lead that same frame when David Hamilton missed a tag and threw wild; Hamilton atoned in the fifth with a fly over the right-center barrier, and there the score sat, 2-2, for seven innings of fine margins — Brice Turang turning two on a 101.8-mph line drive off Jonathan Aranda's bat, Simpson going up the left-field wall to rob Garrett Mitchell, Pratt ruled out on review stealing second in the ninth.³ And Aaron Ashby, arriving in the ninth of a tie game, retired all seven men he faced. His spotless October now runs to eighteen innings, past Andrew Miller's sixteen of 2016 for the longest by a relief man in any single postseason by the Elias Bureau's accounting — a march these columns have followed since he passed Gossage on Sunday.⁵

The record books required attention when it was over. Tampa Bay is the 44th club to fall three games behind in a best-of-seven and only the eleventh to dodge the sweep — the fifth to force a fifth game of a World's Series, after the 1910 Cubs, 1937 Giants, 1970 Reds and 2024 Yankees, and not one of those four ever forced a sixth. It was the seventeenth time a club facing elimination won a Series game in its last at-bat, the first since the 2011 Cardinals turned the trick on this very calendar date, and the 1910 Cubs remain the only other club to manage it with a sweep hanging overhead.⁴ Milwaukee's run of eight October victories in succession, whose record-tying length these columns noted only yesterday, ends at eight. "We've got one more day," said Seymour, who surrendered Pratt's homer and won the game anyway. The arithmetic still leans hard toward Wisconsin — three games to one, the best arm in baseball waiting tonight — but there has been no sweep of a World's Series since 2012, fourteen Octobers running, and this one has now joined the streak.⁴