The Milwaukee Brewers defeated the Los Angeles Dodgers 6-4 on Thursday to reach baseball's World Series for the first time in 44 years after completing a 4-0 series sweep of the star-studded defending champions.
The top-seeded Brewers once again combined relentless offense with clinical relief pitching at Dodger Stadium to fight back from an early 4-0 deficit to snuff out the Dodgers' hopes of a rare World Series three-peat.
The Brewers, who last reached the World Series in 1982, will face either the Cleveland Guardians or Tampa Bay Rays in baseball's championship series.
"We've still got a ways to go. We've still got some big games in front of us," Brewers team captain Christian Yelich said.
"We've been so close to this so many times. Credit to our guys, our team, they stuck together, battled. We got down early, we were like it's gonna be a great story when we come back and win this."
Brewers skipper Pat Murphy meanwhile said simply: "They may have a bunch of Hall of Famers, but we have a bunch of gamers. And the gamers won this week."
After a lacklustre defeat in game three on Wednesday, the Dodgers had been left needing to become only the second team in Major League Baseball history to overturn a 3-0 deficit in a best-of-seven series.
When Shohei Ohtani smashed a three-run home run deep into right field in the bottom of the second inning – the Japanese superstar's first home run in nearly two months – Dodgers fans dared to dream of a miracle.
But Ohtani's mammoth blast was to prove the highlight of another largely inconsistent performance by the Dodgers offense, who squandered a series of late opportunities to get back into the game after stranding runners on third base in multiple innings.
Instead it was the Brewers – swept 4-0 by the Dodgers in the National League Championship Series last year – who rallied to a deserved victory.
After initially struggling to find a way past Dodgers starting pitcher Tyler Glasnow, the Brewers carved out an opening in the fourth inning after Brice Turang and William Contreras got on base.
Jake Bauers -- who was named series Most Valuable Player -- stepped up to drive a double into right field and suddenly the Dodgers lead had been cut to 4-2.
David Hamilton singled to score Sal Frelick in the fifth inning to make it 4-3, and when Bauers drew a walk with the bases loaded in the top of the fifth, the Brewers had drawn level.
Garrett Mitchell then homered for the second straight game in the sixth innning to put the Brewers 5-4 up and Hamilton added an insurance solo shot in the ninth to seal the win.
The Dodgers meanwhile left ruing an anemic offensive display that saw them fail to exploit a series of promising openings.
They failed to score in the sixth, seventh and eighth innings after getting a runner on third base -- two of those occasions with only one out -- and the defeat was sealed with a whimper as Brewers reliever Aaron Ashby mopped up the final three outs.
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