MILWAUKEE -- With a steady barrage of upper-90s fastballs to Sal Frelick, Marlins right-hander Eury Pérez added another impressive moment to his stellar rookie season.

Pérez set down Frelick on five pitches in the first inning Thursday afternoon to record his 100th career strikeout. Only one pitcher in franchise history reached 100 strikeouts faster than Pérez, in terms of innings pitched. Trevor Rogers pulled off the feat in 76 2/3 innings. Pérez did it in 84 innings.

The 20-year-old finished with seven strikeouts in 4 2/3 frames on Thursday. He was charged with three runs on five hits as the Marlins fell, 4-2, to the Brewers, who took the four-game series.

• Games remaining: vs. ATL (3), vs. NYM (3), vs. MIL (3), at NYM (3), at PIT (3)
• Standings update: The Marlins (75-72) are a half-game back of the Giants (75-71), the D-backs (76-72) and the Reds (76-72) for the third National League Wild Card spot. The Marlins hold the first tiebreaker, based on head-to-head matchups, over the D-backs (4-2). Having tied the season series (3-3) with the other two clubs, Miami (21-22 against the NL East) holds the second tiebreaker (intradivisional record) over Cincinnati (19-27 against the NL Central) but not San Francisco (21-14 against the NL West).

Pérez said the 100-strikeout milestone was on his radar entering Thursday.

“Very excited and proud of that achievement,” Pérez said through interpreter Luis Dorante Jr. “Looking for more milestones, to be honest. I'm looking forward to more of those, and I was very excited. I was waiting for that moment.”

Pérez also became the first pitcher 20 years old or younger to record 100-plus strikeouts in a season since the late Marlins right-hander José Fernández had 187 in 2013.

The 6-foot-8 rookie has caught the attention -- and the respect -- of his opponents.

“Eury Pérez is a heck of a pitcher,” Brewers manager Craig Counsell said. “He's an outstanding young pitcher, and he's going to have a great career. He's having a great season. Probably the best young pitcher that we've seen."

Pérez was sharp early on Thursday. He kept Milwaukee off the scoreboard for three innings, facing one over the minimum after working around a one-out double by Josh Donaldson in the second inning. He ran into trouble in the fourth and the fifth, though, allowing three runs on four hits as the Brewers took a lead they would not relinquish.

“I thought Eury pitched good enough to win,” Marlins manager Skip Schumaker said. “Kind of ran out of steam a little bit towards the fourth and fifth inning. But I thought he pitched really well, enough for us to win. We just couldn't get anything going [offensively].”

The 85 pitches (56 strikes) Pérez threw on Thursday weren’t a season high, but he is in uncharted territory as far as workload goes. Including eight starts for Double-A Pensacola, he’s thrown 125 innings this season. His previous career high was 78 innings as an 18-year-old in 2021, and he threw 77 last season.

“In my career, I’ve never had this amount of innings -- in my life. So it's something that is right there,” Pérez said. “But I'm out there ready to compete with the boys. I'm feeling great physically; I'm feeling amazing. But I think the amount of pitches that [Schumaker] saw that I had [in the fifth], I think that was the situation overall.”

Pérez, who has a 3.06 ERA in 18 big league starts, and four Marlins relievers combined to allow just four runs on seven hits and two walks on Thursday. But Miami’s offense was kept at bay, scoring only two runs in the finale and five runs total in the four-game series.

The Marlins jumped out to a 1-0 lead in the first inning before taking a 2-1 lead in the fifth, but they tallied just two baserunners over the final four frames.

“Today was a well-pitched game,” Schumaker said. “We just didn't score enough, and I think that was really the story of all four games.”

After their 3-4 road trip, the Marlins will host a pair of postseason-bound clubs over their three-team, nine-game homestand, with three games against the NL East champion Braves this weekend and three against the Brewers next weekend.

Contender or otherwise, at this stage in the season, each game is as big as the next.

“Every game is big,” Schumaker said. “It doesn't matter who we’re playing, or strength of schedule or whatever it is. Every game is big right now with 15 left. We have, hopefully, a nice homestand. It feels like we've been on the road forever against, obviously, some good teams. ... We take it day by day, and we have to find a way to win [Friday].”