whatever it takes

Everybody digs the long ball nowadays, not just chicks. Milwaukee is not a team that lived by the long ball this season — the Brewers’ 166 home runs ranked 22nd among MLB teams — but the Brewers launched three on Saturday night, which was enough to beat Chicago 3-1 and claim Game 5 of their National League Division Series at American Family Field. Former Mississippi Braves standout William Contreras homered off Ole Miss product Drew Pomeranz in the first inning, Andrew Vaughn homered in the fourth and ex-Biloxi Shuckers star Brice Turang went deep in the seventh. The Cubs’ lone run was a Seiya Suzuki bomb. Home runs win games, the stats show: Teams that out-homer their opponents in a game win more than 70 percent of the time; the percentage is even higher in postseason games. The Brewers, in their first NL Championship Series appearance since 2018, will face Los Angeles, which led the NL in homers with 244, 55 of them by presumptive MVP Shohei Ohtani. Freddie Freeman, the former M-Braves star, hit 24 homers for the Dodgers. The Brewers’ leader was Christian Yelich with 29, followed by Shuckers alums Jackson Chourio (21) and Turang (18). And yet, don’t sell the Brewers short. They beat the Dodgers six straight times in the regular season en route to the league’s best record. The Brewers seemingly are just good at doing whatever it takes in a given game. “It’s a team that deserves and earned their way for the right to go to the World Series. That’s a good baseball team,” Cubs manager Craig Counsell said in an mlb.com piece. The Brewers hit three solo homers Saturday, and their pitching — they were first in the NL in staff ERA — made those runs stand up. Jacob Misiorowski, the rookie All-Star who pitched in Biloxi just last year, delivered four great innings in relief to earn the win, and Abner Uribe (Shuckers ’22-23) retired six of the seven he faced to get the save. As Manny Randhawa writes for mlb.com, they “are the very definition of the phrase ‘greater than the sum of its parts.'” Many of those parts came up through the pipeline from Double-A Biloxi. P.S. The last time Milwaukee played in the NLCS, in 2018, the Dodgers were the opponent. A home run was a highlight in Game 1 of that series: Brandon Woodruff, the Mississippi State product from Wheeler, hit a bomb off Clayton Kershaw — back when pitchers still batted — and won the game with two clean innings out of the bullpen. L.A. won the series in seven. Woodruff currently is on the injured list and won’t be available for the NLCS.