Just a few days ago, the Cubs made the long bus ride home from Milwaukee after dropping the first two games of the National League Division Series to the Brewers. It’s already a distant memory.
On Friday evening, the Cubs drove back up with the series tied, a victory away from a ticket to the NL Championship Series against the Dodgers.
‘‘We had our eyes set on [returning to] Milwaukee as soon as those two games were done the other day,’’ center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong said after the Cubs’ 6-0 victory Thursday against the Brewers at Wrigley Field. ‘‘Everybody’s head was in the right place in terms of what we wanted out of these next three ballgames. And we got to Game 5, and now it’s our job to go close the door.’’
The Cubs faced elimination in back-to-back games and held it at bay. Now, for the first time in the series, the Brewers are in the same boat. And even though the home team has won each of the first four games, the Cubs appear to have the momentum going into Game 5 on Saturday at American Family Field.
‘‘That’s something that you can’t force,’’ Brewers manager Pat Murphy said. ‘‘Momentum in baseball happens based on what’s on the field. The Cubs earned it. They had their backs against the wall, and they played great these last two games. They pitched great, they played great defense, they hit in the clutch, they hit homers.
‘‘They’re built to be great, and they played great these two games. Hopefully the tables will turn when we get into Game 5 at our place. But we have to find out how bad we’re going to fight back.’’
While the Cubs can draw confidence from recent history — they’ve won three elimination games already this postseason — the Brewers have the opposite to contend with. They have missed the playoffs only once in the last eight seasons but haven’t won a postseason series since the 2018 NLDS.
‘‘There’s really not too many of us that have been around or been on teams that have been eliminated from the postseason,’’ outfielder Christian Yelich said before Game 4 on Thursday, ‘‘because we have so much turnover every year, it feels like, on our roster.’’
Yelich, however, has been there for the whole ride after being traded from the Marlins to the Brewers going into 2018.
‘‘I don’t think anybody feels the pressure of, ‘We need to win, we need to win,’ ’’ Yelich said. ‘‘We’ve done a really good job of just focusing on the daily of, ‘Hey, we need to play well to win.’ We obviously want to advance and keep going in the postseason. We think we have a really good team that can do some things.
‘‘You start looking at too much of a bigger picture, and your focus starts to drift from the immediate and the right now and what you need to do to be successful. Then you have divided attention, and that never helps you.’’
To zoom out a little, however, the Brewers would have benefitted from avoiding a Game 5.
In the first two games of the series, their fresh pitching staff and an early offensive push overpowered the Cubs. But their lack of starting-pitching depth, with Brandon Woodruff sidelined by a strained lat and Jacob Misiorowski working out of the bullpen, has begun to show.
When the Cubs knocked right-hander Quinn Priester out of Game 3 with two outs in the first inning Wednesday, the Brewers essentially were forced to throw their second consecutive bullpen game.
So right-hander Freddy Peralta, who started and won Game 1, was back on the mound for Game 4.
‘‘You just want to win,” Murphy said Thursday of the decision to go with Peralta. ‘‘With our starting pitching the way it is right now, we’re limping in with the starting pitching. It hasn’t been our strong point. But also we’re playing to win it all. We’re all-in to win it all. In order to have Freddy for sure for two times in the next series, it was imperative. Best available pitcher, let’s go.’’
But the Brewers didn’t win. And though Peralta gave them four innings, Cubs mainstay Ian Happ launched a three-run home run against him in the first, making sure he felt the pressure from the beginning.
What was manager Craig Counsell’s message after Game 4?
‘‘Pack your bags,’’ he said. ‘‘That’s all we wanted to do [Thursday] was pack our bags. We get to pack our bags.’’
So much about the series was turned on its head in Games 3 and 4 — from the momentum to the pressure to the pitching advantage. And now the Cubs appear to be the ones in the driver’s seat heading back to Milwaukee.
‘‘That’s what we love about this game,’’ catcher Carson Kelly said. ‘‘Every day is a new day. We got another ticket to the dance. So anything could happen, and we’re going to enjoy every moment of it.’’
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