Brewers complete four-game NLCS sweep of Dodgers at Dodger Stadium, end Dodgers' bid for three straight titles
On 16 October 2026 the Milwaukee Brewers completed a four-game sweep of the Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League Championship Series at Dodger Stadium, ending the Dodgers’ season. Brewers manager Pat Murphy stood in the Dodger Stadium clubhouse after the victory and said: “They got a bunch of Hall of Famers. We got a bunch of gamers.”
The result halted a Dodgers team that had entered 2026 aiming to become the first National League club to win three consecutive World Series titles and followed a Milwaukee regular season that produced a franchise-best 103 wins. Milwaukee became the first team to avenge an NLCS sweep by returning the favor against that same opponent in the very next season, a turnaround that concluded with the Brewers dispatching the club critics labelled “the team that destroyed baseball.”
Jake Bauers played a defining role across the series: in Game 2 he drew a 12-pitch walk off Yoshinobu Yamamoto that ignited a rally, in Game 3 he endured an 11-pitch at-bat against Blake Snell which ended with a home run, and in Game 4 he hit a fourth-inning double off Tyler Glasnow before drawing a bases-loaded walk an inning later to tie the game. The article notes Bauers is a journeyman infielder who paused his retirement and returned this season because he needed health insurance for his soon-to-be newborn.
Garrett Mitchell’s sixth-inning solo home run in Game 4 produced the go-ahead run that held, and Aaron Ashby recorded a three-inning save to finish the game. With that victory Milwaukee advanced to its first World Series since 1982 and will await the American League opponent, either the Tampa Bay Rays or the Cleveland Guardians.
Shohei Ohtani, described in the report as the sport’s best two-way player, experienced a difficult finish to the season: injuries ended his pitching, he went homerless from late August until Thursday, and he was dropped to sixth in the batting order for Game 3. In the seventh inning of Game 4, with Kiké Hernández 90ft away from tying the game at five, Ohtani swung at an Aaron Ashby slider the piece described as being “closer to Fresno than the Dodger Stadium home plate.” The Dodgers’ lineup collectively hit for a .590 OPS in the series and the pitching was characterised in the article as uneven.
Despite heavy offseason spending — signing Kyle Tucker and Edwin Díaz for a combined $309m, trading for Cy Young Award winner Tariq Skubal at the deadline and writing “$340m worth of checks” — the Dodgers lost to a club with a payroll ranked 19th. The report adds that the Dodgers’ payroll exceeds the combined payrolls of the Rays, the Guardians and the Brewers, and cites season numbers that included 100 wins, a 38-37 record against teams above .500 and an MLB-worst 128 double-plays.
After the elimination manager Dave Roberts told Fox: “the great thing about what we do is, you can try as much as you want, want it as bad and there’s nothing you can do about it. There’s nothing guaranteed.”
Milwaukee will now contest the World Series for the first time since 1982 against the winner of the American League matchup between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Cleveland Guardians.