Brewers' bats stun Blake Snell, the Dodgers and their fans with emphatic victory to take 3-0 NLCS lead

As the baseball disappeared, Milwaukee's dugout — and the traveling Brewers fans behind it — exploded into revelry. 

The rest of Dodger Stadium morphed, in an instant, into a library.

Things only grew more astonishing when the very next hitter, Garrett Mitchell, doubled up for a solo blast of his own. That left Snell and everyone else in disbelief. He was done, and so, it seems, were the Dodgers.

"Three home runs in a game?" A subdued Snell, who also gave up a big fly to Jackson Chourio on his very first pitch, said after Los Angeles' 6-2 defeat. "I mean, I didn't give up one all year. To give up three in a game, that's pretty frustrating."

Even more frustrating, for both Snell and the Dodgers, is that for about 15 minutes before Snell's implosion, this moribund juggernaut jolted itself and its fan base back to life. After being shut out and shut down for the first five innings by Milwaukee starter Robert Gasser, the Dodgers were gifted a window courtesy of ineffectively wild Brewers reliever Abner Uribe.

In the bottom of the sixth, Uribe offered free passes to three of the first four hitters he faced, loading the bases for scuffing Los Angeles catcher Will Smith, who entered Game 3 just 1-for-23 in October. But Uribe, intent on not walking home a run, piped a fastball to Smith, who clanged it off the midsection of the wall in deep left-center field. Two Dodgers scurried home. The yard erupted. Brewers skipper Pat Murphy inched toward the mound.

The series, it seemed, had flipped. Even when Milwaukee reliever DL Hall punched out the next two Dodgers, stranding two in scoring position, Chavez Ravine buzzed with a sense of optimism that this season, this magical run of dominance, was not dead yet.

That feeling, thanks in large part to Bauers, was remarkably short-lived.

"I was looking for a fastball, and I didn't want to miss it," the well-traveled first baseman explained in his postgame media conference. "I said I'll adjust to anything else, but get a heater — don't miss it."

That Bauers and Snell, former Rays farmhands who shared countless minor-league bus rides, ended up here, on this stage, is a testament to the long, winding, beautiful road that is professional baseball.

Wednesday's two main characters have taken very different paths in the decade since they last shared a clubhouse. Snell stuck with Tampa Bay, achieving stardom, two Cy Youngs and around $139 million in career earnings. Bauers, meanwhile, couldn't quite find a foothold in The Show. He bounced from organization to organization as filler, as depth, as a backup plan.

Twenty-six days before Snell penned his five-year, $182 million contract with the Dodgers in November 2024, Bauers was outrighted, effectively released, by the team he has since pushed within a game of the Fall Classic. But the Brewers, ahead of 2025, brought Bauers back on a minor-league deal. And through circumstance, faith, confidence, obstinance and determination, the 31-year-old SoCal kid finally turned himself into an impact major leaguer. This season, he was the best hitter on baseball's best team.

Over the past few days, he has taken things to a whole new level, looking as dialed in as a ballplayer can be.

"I've seen all the ups and downs he's been through, and it's been a lot of downs. So for him to go through this right now, he's earned it. Hats off to him," a conciliatory Snell shared after the game.

"This is the best I've ever seen him play."

The same sentiment cannot be said of Snell's Dodgers, who now find themselves at the bottom of a very steep mountain. Only one team in MLB history, the 2004 Red Sox, has ever crawled back from a 3-0 deficit in a best-of-seven series. That Dodgers manager Dave Roberts played on that legendary Boston team is more coincidence of history than useful rallying cry.

Make no bones about it; These Dodgers are in dire straits.

"We've got to give them something to cheer about," Roberts said about the understandably unenthused home fans in Game 3. "Kind of play downhill for a little bit, where I think it's just this whole series, they've outslugged us, outhit us."

By the ninth inning, even the overexuberant in-stadium hosts were struggling to keep up the spirits of the rapidly diminishing crowd.

"If you're still here, that means you're a true Dodger fan," one hollered.

In these parts, surrender is signaled not with white flags but with empty seats. There will likely be many of those here on Thursday, with the Dodgers playing for nothing but survival and a slim chance.

It's a stunning place for this sporting colossus to be, one loss away from a long winter of regret.