One under-the-radar subplot of just about every Major League Baseball postseason series is the battle in the media to establish between each team to establish itself as the underdog, the ones with no pressure on them.
Usually, it’s nothing more than eyewash. But as the Milwaukee Brewers, residents of baseball’s smallest market, get ready to take on the Los Angeles Dodgers, the payroll princes of the league, in the National League Championship Series, it isn’t difficult to deduce who the real underdogs are.
“They’re definitely not going to pick us now,” Brewers designated hitter Christian Yelich said.
FanGraphs gives the Brewers just a 29.1% chance of beating the Dodgers. Their odds to win the World Series are +400, lowest of all four remaining teams.
This is all, of course, in spite of the fact the Brewers had baseball’s best record this season, winning a franchise-record 97 games.
“I think that’s kind of been the narrative all year long,” third baseman Caleb Durbin said. “So it’s not really anything new. Since opening day, that’s been kind of the idea, but I think we just really worry about ourselves, and that’s why we’ve been able to click throughout the entire year. It’s not really about who is on the other side; it’s about us. Obviously the Dodgers have a really good team over there, but it’s no different this series.”
Anyone who’s sat in on a Pat Murphy press conference or two would know exactly what he was going to do leading up to this series: Play up the Dodgers’ star-laden roster.
Freddie Freeman is among his favorite people in baseball and Mookie Betts one of his favorite players, that much is not at all fabricated. But that doesn’t mean the Brewers manager wasn’t going to point to the Dodgers’ estimated $396 million payroll whenever the opportunity presented itself.
“We’re not overconfident, that’s for sure,” Murphy said to the first baseball-related question he received on Oct. 12 as both teams worked out at American Family Field. “The Dodgers are a powerhouse, what can you say?”
Murphy, who shortly thereafter pontificated on how many of his team’s position players would even be on the Dodgers roster, never diminishes the achievement of his team but is quick to point out how much less flashy they are when put on paper compared to other top clubs in the league. It’s why he calls them “Average Joes” and “cliffhangers”.
The Dodgers, though, aren’t buying it.
“I’m not falling for the ‘Average Joes’; they’re not,” said Dodgers Game 1 starting pitcher Blake Snell. “They have the best record in the NL. They’re a really good team.”
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts had plenty of praises to sing, as well.
“They’ve done a great job with drafting, scouting, player development, roster construction,” he said. “They do a fantastic job. Then you take Murph and his staff, they’ve dominated it. The bullpen, they get you with the velocity from the right side, the left side. They’ve got sinkers, heavy sinkers.
“…We’ve got our work cut out. But as far as organization-wise, they’ve done a fantastic job.”
Forget market size and payroll for a minute and focus on the matchup at hand, and there are some intriguing stylistic matchups – the high-strikeout, high-chase Snell against the patient, pesky but low-slug Brewers lineup being one of them.
“I was able to watch last night’s game, so that was fun,” Snell said. “They feed off each other. It’s a very energetic lineup. They’re really good. They put the ball in play. You make them swing at your pitches, good pitches. You figure out what they’re good at, what they’re not good at, and that will just tell you how to attack them.”
And then there’s the gamesmanship – some silly, some serious – that will unravel over the next week. The first of that may have come during Murphy’s meeting with reporters, which went over its allotted time as he had all Japanese media members, in town to cover Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Roki Sasaki on the Dodgers, introduce themselves and later read off from his Dodgers scouting reports from 2018 in a thick stack of papers. While Murphy talked, Snell waited.
“Feels weird asking anything normal,” one national writer said as Murphy pointed to him in hopes of extending the presser further.
This is Brewers and Dodgers, the matchup that held multiple shenanigans in the 2018 NLCS. The rich versus the, well, not quite as rich. Hollywood against flyover country. Shohei Ohtani against Chad Patrick.
Prepare for anything but the normal.
“It doesn’t get more underdog than (this),” Yelich said. “It doesn’t matter what happened in the regular season. They’re a different team and even if they weren’t, they’re still the defending champs. They have superstars all over their roster. We’re going to go compete our (expletive) off. That’s what we do.”
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Brewers underdogs in the NLCS? Dodgers say they aren’t falling for it
