SAN DIEGO -- When the ball left Manny Machado's bat in Wednesday's eighth inning, Christian Yelich didn't watch its flight.
He looked directly at Machado and noticed something: The San Diego Padres star third baseman was barely moving. To Yelich, it was a clear indication that the ball would sail over the fence and Game 4 would be tied.
"He's hit about 400 homers in this league," Yelich said. "He kind of knows what it feels like when he gets one."
Instead, Brewers center fielder Garrett Mitchell ranged to Petco Park's warning track, fended off a couple of fans and secured a catch that helped Milwaukee to a 3-1 victory and a return to the National League Championship Series, where a rematch against the two-time defending champion Los Angeles Dodgers awaits.
"I was just trying to get back to the ball," Mitchell said. "The ball was hit really well. I don't know, it just happened. Instinctually just do what I do, make a good jump and see what happens."
The moment felt eerily familiar to one nine years ago, when Adam Jones raced to almost that exact same spot to rob Machado of a critical home run and help Team USA advance to the championship round of the World Baseball Classic.
Wednesday's catch -- on a ball that traveled 406 feet and 106.7 mph -- helped snap the Brewers' 12-game postseason road losing streak, tied for the longest in major league history. Home run robberies have been tracked since 2004. Machado's marked the first time a player had been robbed of a potential game-tying or go-ahead homer in the eighth inning or later of a playoff game, according to ESPN Insights.
"I was really worried," Brewers president of baseball operations Matt Arnold said. "But like Garrett Mitchell just vanished into the crowd and pulled it out. It was awesome."
It became the third heartbreak absorbed by the Padres in this series, following a potential Ty France home run that clanked off a roof panel in Game 1 and the Jackson Chourio walk-off single against Mason Miller in Game 2. And it capped a night in which the Brewers won the way only they can.
By getting four quality innings out of their starting pitcher, Robert Gasser. By a relentless offensive approach that saw them go the first six innings without a strikeout and hardly chase throughout the night. And by deploying a shutdown bullpen, which saw Aaron Ashby, Abner Uribe and Trevor Megill combine for five no-hit innings.
"It's insane what we have back there," Gasser said of the Brewers' relievers. "We give them the ball with the lead, I feel really good about it."
The Brewers won a major league-best 103 regular-season games behind a dominant bullpen, an airtight defense, an offense that excels at the little things -- drawing walks, taking the extra base, producing with runners in scoring position -- and a rotation headlined by two aces in Jacob Misiorowski and Logan Henderson. The question is whether that will be good enough to take down a Dodgers team that outscored them 15-4 in a four-game sweep in last year's NLCS.
Mitchell, who drove in the game's first run and scored its second, believes there's a "different type of confidence and belief in ourselves" that he hopes will make the difference.
"Coming into the postseason, you have a feeling that you're gonna have to go through L.A.," Yelich said. "They're back-to-back champs, and they're a great team. We have a lot of respect for those guys. But at the same time, we feel like we can play with everybody. And when we play our game and our brand of baseball, we're a really hard team to beat."
Padres starter Walker Buehler came in throwing harder than he has all year, but the Brewers' hitters lured him into the strike zone. Sal Frelick led off the third inning with a single, stole second base and came home on Mitchell's base hit up the middle, marking the first time all series the Brewers scored first.
After Fernando Tatis Jr. tied the game with a solo home run in the bottom half, the Brewers answered with a triple by Mitchell and an RBI single from Chourio -- his sixth in four games and the 17th of his postseason career, setting a franchise record and tying Andruw Jones for the most by a player younger than 23. The Brewers tacked on another run on Frelick's sacrifice fly in the sixth, by which point Ashby was mowing down the Padres' lineup on his way to three scoreless innings.
Uribe followed him, and with one out and one on in the bottom of the eighth, he threw an 0-1, 99.6 mph sinker down in the zone. Machado unleashed a swing that seemed primed to tie this game. A sold-out crowd of 47,712 went silent.
Said Gasser: "We went quiet too."
The Brewers are in the postseason for the eighth time in nine years but are still chasing the first championship in the franchise's 57-year history. Fittingly, the Dodgers are in their way. The Brewers have faced the Dodgers three times in the playoffs over the past eight years and lost each series. They have also lost seven playoff games in a row against them, dating back to Game 7 of the 2018 NLCS.
But this year's team will be fronted by two aces that can swing any series -- and a continued belief that their brand of baseball can win it all.
"A lot of people have said we're not built for the postseason because we've done so well in the regular season," Brewers manager Pat Murphy said. "We just have a dearth of players, no stars -- not many stars -- where I think we're proving that, no, we still can win in the postseason because good baseball is good baseball."
