Burnes' chance at history intact despite loss

MILWAUKEE -- Corbin Burnes went from the precipice of history to the brink of defeat faster than you can say duck snort.

After logging nine strikeouts through five innings to move within two of Kenley Jansen’s all-time record for strikeouts in a season before a pitcher issues his first walk, Burnes’ outing unraveled in a flurry of soft contact. The Marlins sent five batters to the plate against him in the sixth and all five tallied hits to start a four-run rally that sealed the Brewers’ 8-0 loss on Monday at American Family Field.

Burnes will still get his chance for history. He’ll carry 49 strikeouts and zero walks into a scheduled start at home against Jansen’s Dodgers on Saturday. That didn't provide much consolation.

“No, the thing to take away from tonight is we had five solid innings,” Burnes said. “I’ll go back briefly tomorrow and look at the pitches on those five hits to start the sixth and see if it was a sequencing thing or they got some good pitches to hit. Then, after that, it’s back to work and get ready for the next one.”

The next one will allow Burnes to bounce back from a game in which Miami tallied as many hits (eight) in five-plus innings as Burnes allowed in his first four starts and 24 1/3 innings. With five runs (four earned), Burnes’ ERA rose from 0.37 to 1.53.

But in a measure of just how stingy Burnes has been, he still finished the night with baseball’s lowest WHIP (0.55) among qualifiers -- a hair ahead of the Mets’ Jacob deGrom. And Burnes is still fifth in ERA, two spots below the tough young Marlins left-hander, Trevor Rogers, who held Milwaukee scoreless over six innings.

“This dude's stuff is really, really legit,” Marlins manager Don Mattingly said of Burnes. “Usually with those kind of guys you’ve got to hang in there with them, with the deGroms -- probably not fair to put him in deGrom's category yet, but it’s that kind of stuff.

“He's going to throw a lot of zeros, and you've got to have somebody that matches him, because as the game gets on you have guys [get] multiple looks they seem to have better at-bats. You've got to have a guy that can throw some zeros with those kind of guys.”

Before the Brewers struggled to get the bats going against Rogers -- the first left-handed starter Milwaukee has seen all season -- there was an early omen that it might not be Burnes’ night when Miami leadoff man Jazz Chisholm Jr. bounced a ball toward second baseman Kolten Wong that hit the lip of the infield and took a wild hop over Wong’s head for an infield single. There would be no no-hitter watch this time for Burnes.

“Hit off a gopher or something,” Burnes said. “We were tested on the very first batter.”

Still, he struck out five of the nine men he faced in his first turn through the order and was humming along with 18 consecutive scoreless innings going into the fourth. The Marlins snapped the streak thanks to, of all things, the baserunning of former Brewer Jesús Aguilar, who scored from first base when Corey Dickerson golfed a two-out double that bounced off the body of a sliding Billy McKinney in left field.

Burnes stopped the scoring there, struck out two more batters in the fifth -- including Jon Berti after Burnes came back from a 3-0 count -- and was still pitching in a 1-0 game when the Marlins ended Burnes’ night with that flurry of hits, only one of which was hit with authority.

Here’s how it went:

• Chisholm hit a ground-rule double just inside the chalk line in right field and over the wall. Exit velocity, according to Statcast: 86.4 mph.

• Miguel Rojas lined an RBI single off the end of the bat up the middle. Exit velocity: 90.3 mph.

• Aguilar hit a bloop single to right field. Exit velocity: 70 mph.

• Garrett Cooper laced a line drive double off the left-center-field wall on a fly for another RBI. Exit velocity: 112.5 mph. It was the hardest-hit ball in play for either team all night.

• Corey Dickerson hit an RBI single through the right side of a drawn in Brewers infield. Exit velocity: 83.5 mph.

That made it 4-0 and the Marlins grew their lead to 5-0 when first baseman Keston Hiura missed reliever Drew Rasmussen’s pickoff throw for an unearned run. It marked the first time that Burnes was charged with four earned runs since July 14, 2019 -- 19 appearances ago.

“For five innings, I was pretty locked in mentally. In the sixth, it kind of unraveled a little bit, kind of lost focus,” Burnes said. “For me, I’ve got to be able to control things I can control. Them dropping in hits and sneaking balls through the infield is out of my control and it started to kind of frustrate me a little bit. I think that’s kind of how we let things get out of control and led to that big inning.”