MILWAUKEE -- The swing Brice Turang had been searching for in the batting cage came with one simple instruction on Sunday: Keep the ball off his knee.
He had already fouled one off his kneecap in his first at-bat against Dodgers lefty Tarik Skubal in Game 1 of the NLCS. When he returned to the plate in the fourth inning, staying inside the baseball sounded like a good way to avoid doing it again.
It turned out to be a pretty good way to change an NLCS game, too.
Turang sent an inside sinker from Skubal over the left-center-field wall, tying a game the Brewers would go on to win, 2-1, at American Family Field. Between that swing and his role in three key double plays, Milwaukee’s second baseman had his hands on just about everything that made this October rematch start differently than the previous.
“I wasn’t trying to hit a homer,” Turang said. “I was trying to hit a nice line drive back up the middle.”
Two nights earlier, he had been working toward exactly that.
Coming off a 2-for-16 Division Series against the Padres, Turang stayed at the park late Friday night to take extra swings with hitting coach Daniel Vogelbach. Turang described a focused session, trying to clean up his bat path, stay inside the ball and drive it toward center field.
Manager Pat Murphy, meanwhile, was at the ballpark with his children, flipping balls and watching another member of his baseball family work.
“That’s what he was working on, exactly,” Murphy said Sunday. “Instead of his hands dropping and cutting across, to just get straight to the baseball.”
Vogelbach described Turang as a perfectionist who occasionally loses a feel over a long season and wants somebody there while he finds it again. Jake Bauers offered a similar assessment: Turang knows his swing, knows when it needs work and is willing to put that work in.
Against Skubal, the payoff came on a 2-0 sinker on the inside edge. It was Turang’s second career postseason homer, and just his seventh against a left-hander in the regular season or postseason.
Skubal was willing to live with the pitch. Turang had simply beaten it.
“I’m gonna tip my hat on a pitch like that,” Skubal said.
Bauers had a harder time explaining how it ended up in left-center.
“He kept his hands tight, and just put a barrel on it,” Bauers said. “He’s not that big when you look at him, but the whip he can generate is second to none.”
By the time of his home run, Turang's glove had already helped keep the powerful Dodgers lineup at bay.
He opened the game by ranging behind second base to backhand Mookie Betts’ grounder and throwing across his body for the out. Later in the first, he took Cooper Pratt’s feed on Will Smith’s grounder and completed an inning-ending double play.
The second-inning turn carried even more weight. Los Angeles had scored once, loaded the bases and forced Jacob Misiorowski through a taxing inning. Kiké Hernández’s grounder gave Pratt a chance to get one out.
Turang made it two.
His quick relay to Bauers beat Hernández to first, ending the inning before another run could count. The Dodgers’ lead stayed at 1-0.
In the fifth, after DL Hall replaced Misiorowski with Betts on first with a walk, Turang moved to his left for Freddie Freeman’s grounder, spun and fired to Pratt at second. Pratt’s throw to first finished another double play, extinguishing the threat one batter into Hall’s outing.
Murphy called Turang’s defensive game “incredible,” singling out the opening play and his double-play turns.
Milwaukee took the lead in the bottom half on Luis Lara's RBI single, then trusted its bullpen and defense to make those two runs stand. Turang added a sacrifice bunt later, another contribution to a night that required every little thing.
“He does everything,” Pratt said. “He defends, he hits, he runs, he knows the game, he’s a baseball rat, he wants to win, he’s a complete player.”
Turang had gone 1-for-15 in last year’s NLCS, which the Dodgers swept in four games. Sunday offered a different beginning built on a swing he had worked to rediscover and the defense that allows him to affect games no matter what he may be going through at the plate.
For him, those extra cage swings also brought something familiar.
“Kind of grew up hitting all the time for late hours of the night,” Turang said. “So sometimes it brings me back to being a kid a little bit and enjoying just going in there and hitting in the cage.”