Brewers hushed to begin crucial road stretch

This was not how the Brewers wanted to start the longest road trip of their shortened season.

A three-city, 10-game jaunt that accounts for a full sixth of the Brewers’ scheduled slate began with Yu Darvish carrying a no-hit bid into the seventh inning of the Cubs’ 4-2 win at Wrigley Field on Thursday.

• Box score

Justin Smoak’s one-out home run in the seventh put the Brewers on the board in both the run column and the hit column, and Smoak’s RBI double in the ninth brought the tying run to the plate, but the Cubs put another game in the win column. Chicago boosted its Major League-best record to 13-3 overall and 8-1 at home, including seven straight wins at Wrigley. Meanwhile, Milwaukee fell 5 1/2 games back in the National League Central standings at 7-10, and while this year’s expanded playoff format means second-place clubs make the cut, there’s urgency for Milwaukee to shake its sluggish start during this trip.

“Obviously they’re pretty hot,” said Brewers ace Brandon Woodruff, who will try to cool the Cubs when the series continues Friday night. “We just haven’t put the good pitching with the good hitting. It’s all kind of been vice versa.”

It’s understood what Woodruff meant, even if the way he said it was a bit off. It’s been that way for the Brewers in 2020 -- a bit off for a team originally constructed to have the depth to navigate a 162-game marathon, when no one could have envisioned a 60-game dash. So far, the approach has not paid dividends, particularly on the offensive leaderboards, where the Brewers began this trip ranked 26th of 30 Major League teams in runs per game and OPS.

“I think this is a huge road trip,” Woodruff said. “We’re going to have to come out and play some good baseball if we want to get through this and I guess make sitting in the [hotel] rooms a little bit easier. It’s going to be big.”

The Brewers’ pitching has been the team’s strength, one of three units in MLB with better than 10 strikeouts per nine innings and an ERA in the middle of the pack. Thursday’s starter Brett Anderson and tandem partner Corbin Burnes kept the Brewers within striking distance by covering all nine innings of a pitching performance much more representative of the season so far than the 12-2 loss to the Twins the night before, which resulted in Eric Lauer’s demotion to the alternate training site.

The pitching, as manager Craig Counsell put it, “has been doing the job.” The offense, with a few recent exceptions, has not, and frustration bubbled to the surface Thursday in the form of catcher Omar Narváez twice slamming his bat on the ground after a popout. When Narváez skied a hittable Rowan Wick curveball to left field to end the game, he broke the bat in half.

For Counsell, the question he will face on this road trip is whether to continue playing the platoon percentages at positions like catcher, where left-handed-hitting Narváez shares time with right-handed-hitting Manny Piña, or to embrace the small sample and go with a hot hand. Piña, for example, homered twice in a comeback win over the Twins on Tuesday, but he did not appear in the two games since because the matchups favored a lefty.

"I guess I would look at it more like this is August 13, and we are sitting a game out of a playoff spot. Would we make wholesale changes at that point?” Counsell said. “I don't think you do. That's kind of how I look at this situation. So these players have a track record. They are not 16-year-olds where we are not sure what they are going to be. These players have pretty good track records, and they are going to come out of it. That's the kind of mode I am operating under right now. I think there's still time for that."

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Smoak is one of the Brewers hitters who has underperformed, but after feeling jumpy against Darvish while striking out in the second inning -- one of Darvish’s 11 strikeouts in seven innings -- and grounding out in the fourth, he said he adopted a “let it come to me” approach in the seventh.

When Darvish threw a breaking ball down and in where a left-handed slugger typically likes it, Smoak hit his second home run this season.

“I'm sure guys would tell you they feel like they got pitches to hit all night and they just missed,” Smoak said. “We've all been trying to fight through it, trying to do what we can to get the ‘feels’ that we want to feel. You know, it's tough. It's not easy. It's something that, being 60 games, it's definitely magnified and we've just got to keep going.

“I feel like as a team, if we get hot we can win 10 in a row, you know what I mean? We have the pitching to do that.”