Yelich leads the way with 5 hits in Brewers' dominant night 

MILWAUKEE -- The Brewers were 2-for-16 with runners in scoring position at one juncture of the seventh inning on Friday, but they were just getting started.

"It was a weird, weird night overall," Christian Yelich said.

But it turned into a great night. Yelich tallied five hits and five RBIs while logging the 300th double of his career. Brice Turang, William Contreras and Sal Frelick chipped in three hits apiece to transform early frustration into a breezy 12-5 win over the White Sox at American Family Field, just the sort of relentless offensive performance that excites first-year manager Pat Murphy about where his club stands as the second full month of the regular season closed.

The Brewers surge into June with a 34-23 record, enjoying their high-water mark in games over .500 (11) and games ahead of the second-place club in the NL Central (six).

They got there Friday with a nonstop flurry of baserunners. Eventually, those opportunities paid off.

The Brewers' 23 hits were not only a season high but the most for any team in any game across the Majors this season. Of those hits, 18 were singles and none were home runs. And in finishing 9-for-27 with runners in scoring position, the Brewers set the mark for most official at-bats with runners in scoring position in any MLB game this season.

"I'm just proud that our guys played all nine after an exhausting series, four games at home versus the Cubs with a lot of emotion," Murphy said. "To come back today and be in that spot, they could have squeezed [the bats] too tight. But they kept playing."

The Brewers have been much better at that this season. After finishing 17th in runs scored last year and 23rd in OPS, Milwaukee went into Friday as one of four Major League teams scoring better than five runs per game and finished the night third in the Majors with a .755 OPS.

"I think you see that we can be dynamic at times," Yelich said. "We didn't hit one homer tonight. That's an example of what we can do as far as traffic, manufacturing runs, taking extra bases, stealing bases. We've got some guys who can hit for power, too.

"There's going to be tough stretches, too. That's how baseball works. But when you can score in multiple ways, you shorten those tough stretches."

The frustration made way for "good things" in the seventh inning when Turang was at the plate. Milwaukee, which had built a 1-0 lead in the second inning and a 4-3 lead in the fourth, found itself in a 5-4 deficit as Turang fell into a 0-2 count against Chicago reliever Mike Soroka.

Turang wouldn't give in, fouling off three consecutive pitches to keep the at-bat alive for a single that tied the game at 5-5.

"That really opened up the floodgates a little bit," Yelich said. "It was like, 'All right, let's go.'"

And off they went. Contreras greeted another Sox reliever, John Brebbia, with a single on the next pitch before Yelich added two more runs with his 300th double, a check-swing job that bounced over third base.

"It was going foul, and whatever kind of spin it had on it brought it back fair, and then I almost fell down going around first base," Yelich said. "You'll take every hit you can get in the Major Leagues, but it was not the cleanest or prettiest one."

His last five-hit game was nearly five years ago, in a 14-inning Brewers win at Washington on Aug. 17, 2019. On that night, Yelich began his day with a first-inning single. On Friday, he struck out after the first two hitters reached.

Just like the rest of Milwaukee's lineup, Yelich stuck with it. With data dating to 1974, the Brewers' greatest number of at-bats with runners in scoring position is 29, most recently in an 18-1 win over the Cubs in August 2010.

Friday flirted with that total.

"A lot of times your most impactful at-bats are the later ones, so it's like, 'OK, let's find a way to have a chance to contribute,'" Yelich said. "That happens every night, but it worked out tonight. I wouldn't say it was the prettiest five-hit game of all time, but you'll never complain about any hits in the big leagues. …

"You just keep playing the game every night and you never really know what you're going to see out there team-wise and individual-wise."