Crew's bats awaken with 6-run rally, B2B HRs

MILWAUKEE -- The Brewers’ offense changed its tune on Sunday, and it wasn’t the back-to-back, booming home runs from Keston Hiura and Christian Yelich in the seventh inning that did it.

Instead, the Brewers won their first 2020 home game by going station to station against three Reds pitchers in the sixth, turning a one-run deficit into a five-run lead on the way to a 9-3 win at Miller Park, denying Cincinnati a sweep and avoiding what would have been Milwaukee’s first 0-5 start at home since its first season here in 1970. Instead of Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” -- the tune that plays after Brewers losses -- Justin Smoak & Co. were treated to some Hall & Oates, “You Make My Dreams Come True.”

“I think every time we played here, we’ve heard the same song -- ‘Everything's gonna be alright,’” said Smoak. “So last night after the game I said, ‘Man, I don’t want to hear that song again.’”

• Box score

Smoak entered the day 0-for-13 and 1-for-24, with MLB’s highest strikeout rate and third-lowest OPS among qualifying hitters. The Milwaukee offense entered the day 25th of 30 Major League teams in runs per game, 26th in OPS and 27th in strikeout rate. They took some of the edge off those numbers by scoring a season-high nine runs on 10 hits, led by three hits from Smoak, including the double that sparked the team’s biggest inning this season.

In the decisive sixth, 13 hitters stepped to the plate against Sonny Gray, Michael Lorenzen and Cody Reed. Those hitters combined for six runs on five hits and four walks. The inning began with the Brewers facing a 2-1 deficit and Smoak lining a first-pitch double off Gray. Brock Holt flew out, but then came all of this:

Single.

Game-tying single.

Walk.

Go-ahead single.

Run-scoring walk.

Run-scoring walk.

Fielder’s choice.

Two-run single.

Yelich and Logan Morrison coaxed the RBI walks from Lorenzen, who replaced Gray with one out and the bases loaded, then didn’t retire a batter. Manny Piña, Hiura and Smoak delivered the run-scoring hits, one apiece against each of the Cincinnati pitchers in the inning. Smoak finished the inning with a hit from each side of the plate, and he finished the afternoon with his first three-hit game in a Brewers uniform.

“When you're struggling, you can try and do too much trying to swing your way out of it, but that's not usually how it works,” said Yelich, who has been navigating that very fine line for weeks. “Usually, it's guys putting together good at-bats and that's how it comes.

“Nothing in baseball happens quickly. You can't go from hitting .100 to .300 in a day -- unless it’s the second game of the season -- so just being able to put together good at-bat after good at-bat after good at-bat, and seeing how [offense] is supposed to look, was nice. Hopefully, we can build off it.”

While Yelich’s early-season struggles made more headlines, Smoak was just as emblematic of Milwaukee’s early slump. Even when his batting average fell to .208 last season with the Blue Jays, he reached base at a .342 clip. The Brewers saw evidence that Smoak was primed to bounce back playing 50 percent of his games at Miller Park, but entering Sunday, Smoak’s 44.2 percent strikeout rate was highest among MLB qualifiers, and his .186 on-base percentage was third lowest.

”It’s just great, when you’re in that kind of thing, to get a huge hit,” Brewers manager Craig Counsell said. “The base hit with two outs in the sixth right-handed was the big hit of the game, I thought, just breaking it open a little bit.”

Counsell and hitting coaches Andy Haines and Jacob Cruz, not to mention the Brewers’ army of analysts under David Stearns, have been working overtime to figure out whether the team’s offensive outage was simply a case of “small sample” or a larger problem. The strikeouts are what surprise Counsell the most, he has said. While replacing departed free agents Yasmani Grandal and Mike Moustakas with a deep field of players, mostly on one-year deals -- many in platoon situations -- the Brewers expected their strikeout rate to come down. Instead, it has gone up to 28.4 percent, the second-worst mark in MLB next to the Tigers.

Could it be one effect of a condensed Summer Camp, in which hitters saw relatively little live pitching?

“I don't really want to make excuses for it, because everybody is in the same boat,” Yelich said. “We had three weeks or so to kind of get rolling. We knew it coming in. It wasn't like anyone was caught off guard, thinking they'd get six weeks to prepare but only got three. It's still only been [13] games, so things can turn quickly. In a season like this, it goes up and down very fast.”

On Sunday, Brewers hitters struck out nine times. That’s not exactly a number to celebrate, but it snapped a streak of seven straight games with double-digit strikeouts.

It was a sign of progress on a day full of them.