Historic Performances Push the Brewers Closer to the Crown

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Photo via Twitter / Brewers

The Brewers’ wins over the Cardinals on Saturday and Sunday clinched a series victory and moved the Crew two steps closer to clinching their third NL Central crown, but that’s probably not why those two games will be remembered.

The team performances in those two outings should not be forgotten but they were certainly overshadowed by a pair of individual performances that crossed a line from “great” into “historic.” The first came on Saturday night, when Adrian Houser stole the show.

The two-seam fastball that Houser throws has largely fallen out of fashion among MLB pitchers, with the widely held belief that a pitch that breaks in a downward direction is easier to square up for batters who have increasingly tilted their swings up in an effort to improve their launch angle. Houser, however, continues to rely heavily on his and has experienced a great deal of success doing so. For a while it appeared he might struggle to avoid the home run ball, as he allowed eleven of them in his first 75 2/3 innings this season. He hasn’t allowed a single home run in any of his last nine outings, however, and has a 2.17 ERA over that span.

On Saturday Houser took his remarkable turnaround one step further, however, and did something no Brewer had done in seven years. He pitched a complete game shutout, blanking the Cardinals on just three hits and no walks in a game the Brewers won 4-0.

Complete game shutouts used to be a common thing: The Brewers have 207 of them in franchise history, but more than half of them came in the franchise’s first 11 seasons. They’ve become increasingly rare in recent years, with Adam McCalvy noting that the Brewers set an MLB record by going 1,012 games without one.

Before Houser’s gem, here are the last five Brewers pitchers to throw a complete game shutout:

• Kyle Lohse was the last one to do it, blanking the Reds in the season’s final week in 2014. It was Lohse’s second complete game shutout of the season and his third as a Brewer. He has three of the Brewers’ last five shutouts despite being out of baseball for five years.
• Matt Garza also logged one in 2014, beating the Reds 1-0 in July. The Brewers scored a run in the top of the first that day and neither team scored again. Since Garza and Lohse did it in 2014, only two other pitchers have thrown a complete game shutout at Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati. No one has done it since 2017.
• Wily Peralta also did it to the Reds on July 9, 2013, this time at Miller Park. Peralta pitched two complete games that season but has not thrown another in nearly 200 outings since.
• Yovani Gallardo picked up the third shutout of his career on April 5, 2011, when he beat the Braves 1-0 in the season’s opening week. The win snapped a season-opening four-game losing streak for the Brewers, who would go 96-62 the rest of the way.
• On a Friday night in San Francisco on September 17, 2010 Randy Wolf outdueled Madison Bumgarner and picked up a 3-0 victory for his only shutout as a Brewer.

Not to be outdone, however, on Sunday the Brewers did something even more unlikely: In the bottom of the ninth inning at American Family Field they overcame a four-run deficit against the Cardinals, beating previously untouchable St. Louis closer Alex Reyes with Daniel Vogelbach’s walk-off grand slam, the first walk-off slam by a pinch hitter in Brewers’ franchise history.

Despite their expanded September roster, Vogelbach was the last player available on the Brewers’ bench on Sunday when he came to the plate. Once the heir apparent at first base, he now finds himself unlikely to land regular playing time with Rowdy Tellez and Eduardo Escobar performing and filling that role. Vogelbach’s big bat could be a strong asset off the bench, however, and it certainly was on Sunday.

While the Brewers had gone 1,012 games without a complete game shutout, it had been 1,983 games since their last wal-off grand slam: Ryan Braun had the last one against the Pirates on September 25, 2008, a moment the Brewers were commemorating with a bobblehead on Sunday.

Before Braun, however, the Brewers had gone even longer without matching this feat: When Braun beat the Pirates in September of 2008, he was the first Brewer to hit a walk-off grand slam since May 15, 1992, when Franklin Stubbs did it to the Rangers. Stubbs, meanwhile, was already the second Brewer to do it that season as B.J. Surhoff had done it to the Twins on April 8, 1992.

All told, there have been eight walk-off grand slams in Brewers’ franchise history. In addition to those mentioned above, here are the other four:

• Cecil Cooper hit the first one against the Mariners on June 26, 1977. To date he and Vogelbach are the only Brewers ever to hit come-from-behind walk-off slams, as all the others came in tied games.
• Sixto Lezcano did it to beat Dick Drago and the Red Sox on April 10, 1980.
• Ted Simmons did it on April 25, 1985, for one of the final home runs of his Brewers career.
• Greg Vaughn beat the A’s with one on June 16, 1991, saving a day on which the Brewers had blown a 7-1 lead.