In the seventh inning, Sean Murphy walked to load the bases with no outs, but Michael Harris II struck out and Ozzie Albies tapped back to the pitcher. After Eli White worked another walk, Nacho Alvarez struck out on a full count to leave them loaded.

The Braves had eight hits and eight walks and just two runs in tonight’s ballgame.

Right now, the Brewers are the winningest team in baseball. It’s not because they’re outslugging everyone: their lineup has a collective OPS just a little north of .720, and their cleanup hitter, Andrew Vaughn, has been one of the worst players in baseball since the White Sox called him up in 2021.

Of course, since he came over to Milwaukee a few weeks ago, he’s OPSing over 1.000 and he has three hits and two walks over the past two nights.

The Brewers are good every year. They do it with pitching, defense, and terrific baseball operations: good drafting, good player development, and a very good track record with trades.

In 2016, they drafted Corbin Burnes in the fourth round; five years later, he won the Cy Young Award for them, and a few years later, they traded him to the Orioles for DL Hall and Joey Ortiz. It was the kind of return the Braves might have hoped to get for the final year of Max Fried’s tenure, if they had had the stomach to trade him.

Now, their ace is Freddy Peralta, whom the Mariners originally signed in 2013, when he was 16 years old; the Brewers then got him in the Adam Lind trade in 2015.

Their best position players are Brice Turang, whom they drafted in 2018, and William Contreras, whom they got from us, in a trade in which all they gave up was Esteury Ruiz. Their other best player, of course, is Christian Yelich, whom they signed for nearly $200 million.

That said, as is often the case for pitching-and-defense squads, they have done much better in the regular season than in the playoffs. They have not made the World Series since 1982; they have won a total of two postseason games since 2019. They are not flawless, they are not doing it with a cheat code, and they are not the paragon we should be imitating.

But they’re twenty-two games better than us this year, they’ve handed us our hats in this series, and the things they are good at are the things that we like to think that we are good at.

Sometimes, it can be helpful to look in the mirror.