Dodgers are in for a fight and Brewers just proved it

MILWAUKEE – The Dodgers have a fight on their hands.In their 2-1 defeat to the Brewers at American Family Field on Sunday night, the Dodgers were shown what they’re in for in this National League Championship Series.The blue-collar Brewers won by playing the kind of baseball they played in their 103-win regular season.They made four pitching changes on a night in which they started their prohibitive favorite to win the Cy Young Award.They bunted.They played clean defense.Here’s what they didn’t do: They didn’t roll over the way they did last year when the Dodgers swept them in four games at this stage of the postseason.The Brewers played with an edge they didn’t have a season ago, which was evident by a remark made by manager Pat Murphy before the game about Dodgers starting pitcher Tarik Skubal.“I just want to step on his throat, do you know what I mean?” Murphy said.“I mean that respectfully because I really like Tarik, but I just want to beat him.”He was joking, but he wasn’t.The Brewers didn’t so much step on Skubal’s throat as they scratched and pinched him into submission, scoring once off him in the fourth inning and once more in the fifth and making those runs stand.This was a game the Brewers had to win, and they played like it.Jacob Misiorowski on the mound.In front of a home crowd at American Family Field.The Brewers won more games than any team in baseball this year, but what works in the regular season doesn’t necessarily work in October.In the case of the Brewers, their majority of their starting rotation became almost unusable once the postseason started.Outside of Misiorowski, they have only one other pitcher capable of making a traditional start in rookie Logan Henderson.But the 24-year-old Henderson is by no means a workhorse.

In each of his last three regular-season starts, he pitched five innings.In his postseason debut against the San Diego Padres in the Divisional Round, he pitched five innings.Beyond that, they ha...