The Milwaukee Brewers beat the Arizona Diamondbacks 7-4 in 11 innings on July 3, but Pat Murphy sounded as if he had just watched a game slip through his hands and then come back. “I’m not sure we did that tonight,” he said after Milwaukee survived a night that ran more than 3½ hours and ended with the kind of finish that made the manager question which club had actually won.
It is why Brandon Woodruff has become a name to watch again for Milwaukee, even on a night when the Brewers needed every bit of their current arms to get through one of their messiest victories. The game turned in the top of the 11th, when Jackson Chourio dropped a two-foot dribbler that produced two runs after Ryan Thompson threw wildly home, and Brice Turang followed with a two-run single to make it 7-3. Milwaukee had been hitless in its last 13 at-bats with runners in scoring position before that burst, and it had gone 3 for 18 with runners on base by the end of the eighth.
The shape of the win was built much earlier, when Kyle Harrison did not make it out of the third inning and Chad Patrick stepped in before Aaron Ashby, Abner Uribe and Trevor Megill carried the middle innings. Pat Murphy called the group’s work “pretty impeccable,” saying, “Megill, Uribe, Ashby, on top of Patrick. 8⅓ innings of relief, it was pretty impeccable.” That kind of usage left Milwaukee asking 25 outs from the bullpen after the starter was gone, and it still needed Grant Anderson to finish the job.
Anderson gave Murphy the calm he could not find anywhere else. He recorded the final six outs and needed only five pitches in the 10th inning, then induced a double play after a Corbin Carroll intentional walk before working around an Ildemaro Vargas RBI single in the 11th. “His poise was amazing,” Murphy said. That poise mattered because the Brewers also had to survive their own mistakes, including a second squeeze bunt with Cooper Pratt in three days that never got out of the dirt and left Jake Bauers caught between third and home.
Murphy did not try to dress up the rest of it. He said the club “did everything we could to screw it up,” and added, “I’m not sure which team lost it and which team won it.” Then he went a step further: “You can’t make that [expletive] up.” The Brewers left Chase Field in Phoenix with the result, but the manager’s tone fit the night better than the score did. Milwaukee won the game. It just took nearly everything around it to make that believable.
