The Brewers were sleepwalking through this one until the sixth inning flipped everything. A Daniel Palencia balk brought home a run to make it a one-run game, Seiya Suzuki couldn't track down a ball in the outfield to let Milwaukee tie it, and then Christian Yelich did what Christian Yelich does against the Cubs -- he put one over the fence.
Seiya Suzuki can't make the catch and the Brewers tie it in the sixth!
Andrew Vaughn had actually tied it moments earlier on a double down the line that looked catchable, according to Adam McCalvy, before Yelich sent his two-run shot out to flip the lead to Milwaukee for good. It's the kind of at-bat that's defined Yelich's career against Chicago -- the former MVP has made a habit of burying the Cubs in big spots for a decade now.
Christian Yelich go-ahead two-run homer!
Milwaukee's bullpen got some fresh faces in the middle of all this, too. JoJo Romero -- part of the Dustin May/Romero package the Brewers landed from the Cardinals at the deadline -- made his franchise debut in relief in the sixth after working his way back from an appendectomy and a rehab stint in the minors. A few innings later, Abner Uribe took the mound for his first outing since coming off the injured list, and he still looked like himself, sitting 100 mph on a Turbo Sinker that made Rob Friedman's highlight reel.
The scarier moment came in shallow left, where Jackson Chourio, Cooper Pratt and Joey Ortiz all converged on the same pop-up. McCalvy described it as a dangerous collision that looked worse for Pratt than the other two from where he was watching -- "two of the best run prevention units in baseball are having a tough night," as he put it.
A scary scene as Cooper Pratt, Jackson Chourio, and Joey Ortiz collide in the outfield. All three stayed in the game, but Pratt was in noticeable pain.
The good news: all three players stayed in the game. That's not nothing given how these collisions usually go, and it let the Brewers close things out with their outfield intact. Milwaukee finished it off 9-4, per McCalvy, with Joey Ortiz also going deep late to put it away.
The win pushed Milwaukee's NL Central lead to 8 games with 23 left to play, and the Brewers also own the tiebreaker over Chicago at 5-3 in the season series if it somehow gets that close down the stretch. It's the latest data point in what's become a two-year run of dominance under manager Pat Murphy, who guided this club to a franchise-record 97 wins and back-to-back NL Manager of the Year honors -- Milwaukee now owns the best record in baseball since he took over before the 2024 season, ahead of the Dodgers, Phillies and Yankees.
Yelich, for his part, sounded like a guy who knows exactly what his team just pulled off. Asked about the comeback afterward, he used "zoo" as a verb to describe the sixth inning -- which tracks, because from the balk to the tying error to the go-ahead blast to the outfield pileup, this game basically was one.