Well folks, October baseball found a way to be October baseball. San Diego came out swinging and had Milwaukee down 2-0 before a lot of the crowd had finished their first beer, and for a few innings it looked like a long night at American Family Field. Then Jackson Chourio decided he wasn't interested in a quiet Game 1 — a two-run homer in the third tied it at two, his fifth career postseason home run, a new Brewers franchise record for a player still just 22 years old. The kid doesn't seem to know the moment is supposed to be bigger than he is.
Misiorowski's first postseason start as a starter ended after four, the game still knotted at 2-2 — not the line he wanted personally, but not a bad place to hand it off either. The score held right there through the fifth and sixth, and then in the seventh, William Contreras sent one out to put Milwaukee ahead for good — a solo shot off Padres reliever Adrián Morejón that made it 3-2, Brewers. It's Contreras' first real postseason moment after a rough final week of the regular season that ended with him getting benched for not hustling down the line. Say what you want about a message being sent — the response has been visible ever since, and tonight it was the actual go-ahead run in a Game 1.
From there it was Milwaukee's bullpen the rest of the way — Antonio Senzatela, Aaron Ashby, Abner Uribe, DL Hall and Trevor Megill combined for five shutout innings behind the Chourio-and-Contreras lead, and if the final few outs felt a little too dramatic for a bullpen that hadn't allowed a run since the fifth, that's because they were. Megill struck out Fernando Tatis Jr. to escape the eighth, then came back out for the ninth and got the strangest out of the night: Ty France drove one deep enough to end it the normal way, except the ball never came down — it struck a roof truss cable high above the field of play, and under American Family Field's own ground rules, a ball that strikes permanent roof structure and falls back onto the field stays live. Out. Upheld on replay. Nobody in either dugout had seen that one before.
Final: Brewers 3, Padres 2. The series heads to Game 2 with Milwaukee up 1-0, home-field advantage already doing its job.