For the second time this season, the Milwaukee Brewers have won 11 straight games. And tonight, this remarkable team showed that, right now, it doesn’t matter if the pitcher across from them is some Quad-A pitcher, the Cy Young frontrunner, or Sandy Koufax. Whoever it is, they’re going to make life hard on them.
That’s what they did tonight, in a matchup between Paul Skenes, the National League’s best pitcher, and the scrappy-yet-sometimes-frustrating ace of the Milwaukee staff, Freddy Peralta. They made things hard on Skenes, and for the second time this season, they got to him and forced an early exit. After that, the Brewer offense — having more apparent fun than I recall seeing from this lineup in my 30-plus years of fandom — just kept piling on hits and runs, no matter who they were facing. Peralta lived up to his side of the pitcher’s duel billing, and this was an easy one for the Brewers as their magical run continued.
Things looked good right from the beginning. Peralta tore through the top of the first, as Spencer Horwitz popped out to Andrew Vaughn in foul territory, and the next two, Nick Gonzales and Bryan Reynolds, both struck out.
Sal Frelick, leading off the bottom of the first against the Pirates’ superstar, saw seven pitches from Skenes and blasted the last one out to right field for his ninth homer of the year (and his first hit in 10 career plate appearances against Skenes). After a soft lineout from Isaac Collins, William Contreras almost had a second homer in the inning when he hit one to the right field corner, but it held up just enough for Reynolds to catch it on the track. Christian Yelich followed with a two-out single to center, but Skenes struck out Vaughn to end the inning. But it was a productive inning on two fronts: not only did the Brewers take a 1-0 lead to the second, but they’d made Skenes throw 25 pitches.
Peralta looked good again in the second with strikeouts of Oneil Cruz and Andrew McCutchen and a flyout from Jack Suwinski, and Skenes responded with a 1-2-3 inning of his own. After Jared Triolo popped out and Henry Davis grounded out, Peralta was perfect through the first eight batters, but he allowed his first hit when Isiah Kiner-Falefa hit a two-out double just out of the reach of Collins in left field. But one pitch later, Peralta got Horwitz to fly out, and the inning was over.
Joey Ortiz flew out to start the bottom of the third, but the pesky Frelick drew a one-out walk. Skenes struck out the next batter, Collins, on three pitches, but Contreras again made solid contact to the opposite field — and this time it found grass. Contreras had a double, Frelick scored from first, and the Brewers were up 2-0. Yelich then worked an eight-pitch walk, and Andrew Vaughn hit one into the gap … but it had a bit too much air under it and Cruz made a running catch to end the inning. Still, 2-0 Brewers, and Skenes was up to 64 pitches.
Gonzales reached on what was ruled an error on Caleb Durbin to start the bottom of the third (it was a tough play and could certainly have been ruled a hit). Peralta struck out Reynolds but walked Cruz, and there were two on with one out. But a brief mound visit worked, and McCutchen grounded into a 5-4-3 double play that ended the frame.
With one out in the bottom of the fourth, Skenes got ahead of Brice Turang 0-2 and thought he had a strikeout looking on a fastball on the inside corner. He should’ve gotten the call, but he didn’t, and two pitches later, a 3-2 fastball got too much of the plate and Turang, who has turned into a skinny Jim Thome at the plate in the last two weeks, hit it out for his 12th homer and sixth in the month of August. It’s August 12. For reference, he had seven in 619 plate appearances last season.
After a Blake Perkins strikeout, Ortiz blooped a fly ball into shallow left center that both Cruz and Suwinski dove and/or slid for. They collided, Cruz was down for a minute but stayed in the game, and Ortiz ended up at second with a double (on 71-mph exit velocity!). That gave Frelick a two-out at-bat, and today, Frelick was Skenes’ worst enemy. He pounded a single through the infield that scored Ortiz and made it 4-0.
Collins grounded out to end the inning, but Skenes’ pitch count was up to 93, and he didn’t come back for the fifth. For the second time this season, the Brewers put four runs on Skenes in four innings. That equals the total number of games in which Skenes has allowed four runs against the rest of the league.
Suwinski struck out looking on a marginal strike three call to start the fifth, and Pirates manager Don Kelly was not pleased, especially after the marginal call that went the other way against Turang. He came out to let home plate umpire Roberto Ortiz know of his displeasure, and he was quickly tossed. Peralta proceeded to get Triolo on a groundout and Davis on a strikeout, and Peralta was through five scoreless innings with very un-Freddy-like efficiency: he’d used only 64 pitches.
The new Pittsburgh pitcher in the bottom of the fifth was Yohan Ramírez, who Brewers fans may remember as an instigator in the season-opening Mets series of 2024 (he was ejected and suspended for hitting Rhys Hoskins). Ramírez started ominously by walking Contreras on four pitches. After one more ball to Yelich, he finally threw a strike …a 95-mph fastball in what some would call the “happy zone,” and Yelich hit it out above the Brewer bullpen for his 23rd home run. 6-0 Brewers.
Ramírez settled after that and got the next three. Horwitz picked up a one-out single in the top of the sixth, just the second hit off of Peralta, and a couple of batters later, Reynolds singled, too. The Pirates went to pinch-hitter Tommy Pham with two on and two out — the righty, Pham, in place of the lefty, Cruz, against a right-handed pitcher, suggesting that Cruz was perhaps feeling the effects of that collision in the outfield. The Pham move almost paid off — for the second straight game, he got into one, but for the second straight game, it was caught on the warning track. Peralta was through six shutout innings.
Perkins singled to lead off the bottom of the sixth. Ramírez thought he had a double play when Ortiz hit a soft comebacker right to him, but Gonzales couldn’t handle Ramírez’s (perfectly fine) throw to second, and instead of a double play, there were runners on first and second with no outs and the top of the Brewer order coming up. Frelick then walked on four pitches, and the Pirates’ acting manager (after Kelly’s ejection), 78-year-old Gene Lamont*, came out and made a change to bring in lefty Ryan Borucki to face Collins.
The move to Borucki did not work. Collins hit a sacrifice fly to right that scored Perkins, and then the floodgates opened. Contreras and Yelich hit back-to-back run-scoring singles, and with runners on the corners and one out, Vaughn launched a behemoth of a home run to left; 109 mph, 441 feet, one of the more majestic home runs of the season. When the dust had settled on Vaughn’s bomb, it was 12-0.
*Just because, a quick aside about Lamont. A catcher, he was drafted in the first round by the Detroit Tigers in 1965, and had a brief major league career in the first half of the ’70s, with a few appearances here and there and one season as Bill Freehan’s full-time backup. He managed in the minor leagues in the late ‘70s and early ’80s before becoming the third-base coach for the Barry Bonds-Jim Leyland Pirates in the late 1980s. Lamont got his first big-league managerial gig with the White Sox in 1992, and he managed the 1993 White Sox into the postseason and oversaw two MVP campaigns by his first baseman, Frank Thomas. After the White Sox fired him in 1995, Lamont got one more gig as a manager, with the Pirates, from 1997-2000.
Borucki retired Durbin and pinch-hitter Andruw Monasterio to mercifully end the inning. (A minor curiosity: Monasterio went to third base, and Durbin moved to second, after Monasterio had replaced Turang in the lineup.) With a 12-run lead and the long layoff between innings, Peralta’s excellent night was finished: six innings, three hits, a walk, no runs, and seven strikeouts on a relatively efficient 89 pitches. Pat Murphy turned to Grant Anderson to replace Peralta, and he had a 1-2-3 inning in the seventh.
Ortiz hit a fly ball over the head of Suwinski in center with one out in the bottom of the seventh, and it bounced over the wall for a ground-rule double. He moved to third on a passed ball, but Frelick’s one-out fly ball wasn’t deep enough to score him, and he was stranded at third when Collins also flied out.
Aaron Ashby replaced Anderson in the eighth (as well as Anthony Seigler coming in for Vaughn at first base) and the Pirates went down meekly: a groundout, a strikeout, and a groundout on nine pitches. The new Pirates pitcher in the bottom of the eighth was Jared Triolo, who moved to the mound from shortstop. Contreras grounded out on a 40-mph … curveball? (according to Statcast), but Jansen got to second after hitting a fly ball deep to left. It wouldn’t have been an easy catch, but Pham should’ve caught it, but instead it bounced off his glove for a two-base error. Pham did catch it when Seigler flew out, but Triolo couldn’t close the scoreless inning: instead, Durbin, the only Brewer starter without a hit, took a 43-mph floater (that was a little off the plate!) and hit it just over the wall in right center.
Triolo and Monasterio locked in a fierce battle — and Triolo more than doubled his pitch speed with a couple of mid-80s fastballs — but Monasterio won that battle with a double to deep center on a 3-2 pitch. Blake Perkins then came up for what I assume was his first-ever MLB at-bat as a right-handed batter against a right-handed pitcher and walked on four pitches that were way over his head. Ortiz jumped on the first pitch he saw and lined it into right for a single, but Frelick popped out to Triolo to end the inning with the score 14-0.
On to try to finish off the shutout was Seigler, making his debut performance on the mound. His stuff was a little better than Triolo’s — a fastball that consistently found the zone in the upper-60s to mid-70s. After Gonzales singled to lead things off, Seigler got Alexander Canario, Pham, and Liover Peguero to fly out to end the game.
It was a magnificent box score. Frelick, Contreras, Yelich, and Ortiz all had multiple hits, and seven different Brewers had RBIs. Among the highlights: Yelich was 3-for-3 with a walk, two runs scored, a homer, and three RBI; Frelick was 2-for-4 with a homer, two walks, three runs scored, and two RBI; Ortiz was 3-for-5 with two doubles and two runs scored; and Contreras was 2-for-4 with a double, two runs scored, two RBI, and a walk. That doesn’t even get to Vaughn’s three-run homer or Durbin’s garbage-time two-run shot. I mentioned Peralta’s line, but it’s worth noting also that his 14th win gives him the sole MLB lead in that category.
This was an emphatic victory, and while the Pirates are not much to write home about, Paul Skenes is. The Brewers made him look utterly touchable, and they detonated against the Pittsburgh bullpen once they got there. This team is rolling in a big way, and they’ll go for 12 straight — and burgers — tomorrow at 1:10 p.m., when Mitch Keller and Brandon Woodruff face off in another good pitching matchup.