Vinnie Pasquantino: Why the Brewers Own a Commanding 3-0 WS Lead on the Rays

Vinnie Pasquantino plays first base for the Kansas City Royals. In October, he's also the show's de facto baseball playoff correspondent and pundit. This week, he checked in with something most correspondents don't have: a seat at Game 1 of the World Series in Milwaukee.

A Ghost Town Parking Lot in Milwaukee

Pasquantino went to Friday's opener between the Brewers and Rays with a crew of neighbors and a former high school teacher. One of the neighbors is a massive Brewers fan who had a baby the Tuesday before and still got cleared to go. "He told us all this morning he's fully on baby duty," Pasquantino said. The teacher, who still teaches at Pasquantino's high school, James River in Richmond, spent his summers in Wisconsin and had planned to head up just to be in the city during the World Series. Pasquantino called him with a better offer.

What stuck with him was the parking lot. He got to the stadium about 40 minutes before first pitch, and nobody was there. "You pull up and you're like, wait, why is this so easy right now?" he said. "It looked like a ghost town outside, but in a great way of just everybody's here for the game."

Rich, a Big Ten guy who has met plenty of people from Wisconsin, explained why that matters. Tailgating in that state is "basically a God-given, natural-born right." Rich had even been told the Brewers' stadium sits where it does because the only downtown option had no room to tailgate. An empty lot 40 minutes before a game meant everyone was already inside.

The tailgating just moved to the back end. Pasquantino drove back to Chicago afterward, about an hour away, and spent longer waiting to get out of the parking lot than on the drive itself. He was at Game 1 of last year's World Series in Toronto too, and said Milwaukee was "just as good, if not better, atmosphere-wise." Brewers fans had waited 44 years for this.

Why the Brewers Lead the Rays 3-0

Rich asked the obvious question: why are the Brewers up three games to none? "They just seem to be better," Pasquantino said. "I think that's the easiest way to say it."

He pointed to some uncharacteristic moments from Tampa Bay, including mistakes in the field and a player losing his cool in the dugout. "You don't see things like that from a team like them a whole lot."

Rich brought a stat: in Game 3, the Brewers saw 175 pitches and swung and missed at 13 of them. Pasquantino said that's usually the Rays' calling card, not Milwaukee's. The Brewers will typically strike out a bit more and make contact a bit less.

The big inning showed what that looks like. Pasquantino recalled it unfolding in roughly 10 pitches, going from 2-0 to 8-0 without a home run. "It was all just keep the line moving, get a base hit, next guy gets them over," he said. "They're kind of a wagon and tough to stop." Rich added that the opposite-field hits weren't bleeders, either. "They were on the screws."

Game 3 was the first World Series game the Rays had hosted since 2008, and Milwaukee came in and beat them down. Pasquantino called it "an exclamation point" on the series. "If it happens in July, you just throw it away. But it happened on the biggest stage."

He was careful not to declare the series over. Only one team has ever come back from 3-0, a stat Rich joked Chris Brockman is always happy to provide, and Pasquantino laid out exactly how it happens: "All we got to do is win today, and then tomorrow, all we got to do is win today." Keep that mantra going and suddenly it's 3-3. That's why he wanted Milwaukee to finish it right away. A sweep would put the Brewers at 11-1 this postseason, up there with some of the all-time great playoff runs.

What It Feels Like When Everything Is Working

Rich asked what it's like when the baseball looks like a basketball and pitchers feel like they're playing catch. Pasquantino joked that for a Royals player, that only happens after they've been eliminated. Rich praised the humility, then pushed for a real answer.

Pasquantino recalled a stretch in August when the Royals won seven or eight in a row. "It doesn't matter if you're winning or losing going into the seventh inning, it just feels like you're going to win," he said. "When the other team hits the ball hard, you're getting guys out. When you hit the ball soft, you're getting on base." In the playoffs, he said, facing the best team in the league while they're hot leaves "not much you can do about it." The Rays are really good, but the Brewers are making them look worse than they are.

The Secret to Pat Murphy

Rich asked what Pasquantino hears about Brewers manager Pat Murphy. He was upfront that he doesn't know Murphy personally. But Murphy has been around the game a long time, people always thought he deserved a shot, and when Craig Counsell left for Chicago, Murphy felt like the obvious choice.

The word Pasquantino kept coming back to was accountability. "From everything I hear, it doesn't matter who you are. Team meetings can be brutal," he said. "In a good way. I don't mean in a bad way. Anybody can be called out at any given time."

His example came from Game 3. Up 10-0 in the eighth, Sal Frelick ran around first base on a two-out fly ball to center "like his hair is on fire." Pasquantino said effort like that shouldn't need praise because it's the job, but a team doing it nightly says something about the culture.

He also said Murphy's players love him. Opponents don't always, because Murphy isn't scared to get in the mix with a little talking. "I think that's why his guys have his back as much as they do," Pasquantino said, "because they know that he's there for them at all times."

Rich asked how it lands when a manager calls you out. For Pasquantino, it comes down to who writes the lineup. Hitting and pitching coaches hold their meetings, and there's talk about front offices shaping lineups, "but at the end of the day, one person signs that lineup at the bottom, and it's the manager." Managers don't come into meetings often because they're running the whole operation, so when they do, praise or criticism, "it just means a little bit more when it's coming from that voice."

No Thanks to Picking Your Playoff Opponent

Rich's last question was about a proposal reportedly on the table among MLB owners: letting teams choose their playoff opponents. Pasquantino, noting his opinions are his own and not the union's, is not a fan.

"It puts both teams in a weird spot," he said. Someone would have to make that call, likely not a player or coach, and "you're going to have a fall guy for that one" if the team you picked beats you. It's easy bulletin-board material. He'd rather see reseeding, including fixing situations where the teams with the three best records can't meet in the LCS, or a format where division winners make the playoffs without automatically getting home games.

Rich went further and said he hated it, pointing out that if the third seed chooses its opponent, the fourth seed effectively gets its opponent picked by another team. Pasquantino added a clubhouse angle: a locker room that is fully unified going into October could be split by a decision half the room disagrees with. "It's just unnecessary drama that we don't need," he said. "Just seed it."

Pasquantino noted that if the Series ended that night, there were only five more days until moves and trades could be made. The offseason, as he put it, starts quick.