Three home runs. One inning. Both aces down.
The Dodgers went into this NLCS as World Series favorites. Favorites by the odds for 1,039 of 1,045 days going back to December 2023, per Covers.com. Now they’re down 3-0 to a Brewers team that opened this series as the clear underdog, and they have to win four straight just to survive October.
Two different Cy Young-caliber arms just got torn apart by the same lineup in back-to-back starts.
Start with Yamamoto. Game 2, shortest postseason outing of his career, gone after 2⅔ innings when a 36-pitch third inning turned into a track meet, per SI’s recap. Brewers won that one 7-4.
Then Snell happened. He’d thrown 46⅓ innings this season without allowing a single home run. Dominant through six in Game 3 — 81 pitches, nine strikeouts, 14 straight outs. Then the seventh. Jackson Chourio jumped a 97.6 mph first-pitch fastball for a leadoff shot, tying him with Ohtani, Jeter, and Rollins for third-most leadoff postseason homers ever, according to Yahoo Sports. Jake Bauers fouled off five pitches, fell behind, kept battling, and drove the 11th offering 412 feet. Garrett Mitchell followed with a 428-foot solo shot to almost the same spot. Snell called it “pretty frustrating,” which is the understatement of the Dodgers’ season.
The part that actually matters for your wallet: Vegas had this team at +250 to win it all entering the playoffs — the shortest number on the board, no contest. After Game 1, that number jumped to +350, the longest it’s been all year. By the time the Brewers finished off Snell in Game 3, the market had flipped entirely: Milwaukee sits at 45% to win the World Series, the Dodgers at 22%, per ESPN’s betting desk. That’s not a correction. That’s the number pricing in the exact thing that just happened twice: the two guys the whole championship case was built around both getting hit the same way, by the same team, six days apart.
And yet Vegas still has the Dodgers -174 tonight. Books clearly think a ballpark full of nerves and Tyler Glasnow on the mound beats a team that’s run the table.
History says don’t bet on the comeback. Of the 34 teams that have fallen behind 0-3 in a best-of-seven, exactly one has ever come back — the 2004 Red Sox, en route to sweeping the Cardinals, per SI’s archive. The 2020 Astros got as far as forcing a Game 7 and still lost. Everyone else just went home.
The moment the series flipped for good:
A 3-0 lead nobody outside Milwaukee saw coming back in April.
Everyone spent the week before this series saying the Brewers play the game the right way. Nobody mentioned it would cost the Dodgers their season. If Snell and Yamamoto both get beat again, the defending back-to-back champs are watching the World Series from home, and that title price everyone grabbed in April is worth exactly nothing.
