Ben Williamson's pinch-hit single capped a two-run 12th and cut Milwaukee's World Series lead to 3-1. Game 5 is Wednesday night at Tropicana Field.
The Tampa Bay Rays are still alive. On Tuesday night, Oct. 27, they beat the Milwaukee Brewers 4-3 in 12 innings at Tropicana Field, according to Associated Press reporting carried by NPR and NBC News, and the World Series now stands at 3-1 with Game 5 set for Wednesday night in St. Petersburg.
How the 12th inning flipped
Milwaukee was three outs from its first championship. Rookie shortstop Cooper Pratt hit a tiebreaking home run off Ian Seymour in the top of the 12th, his fourth hit of the game, to make it 3-2. AP says Pratt, 22, became the first rookie to hit an extra-inning homer in a World Series.
Then the bottom half unraveled. Junior Caminero led off with a grounder to third, and Joey Ortiz's throw bounced past first baseman Jake Bauers for an error. Liam Hicks singled, and Jonny DeLuca's single scored pinch-runner Cedric Mullins to tie it at 3. Chandler Simpson's single loaded the bases against rookie lefty Shane Drohan, who was pitching for the first time since Oct. 15.
Milwaukee brought in a five-man infield. Pinch-hitter Ben Williamson, who was 1 for 15 this postseason before the at-bat, chopped a ball over Bauers into short right field to end it. The game lasted 4 hours, 20 minutes and finished at 12:28 a.m. ET Wednesday.
The numbers behind the comeback
Tampa Bay ended an eight-game winning streak for the Brewers. According to AP, the Rays are the fifth of 26 teams to fall behind 3-0 in the World Series and win Game 4, and the previous four all lost Game 5. OptaSTATS says Tampa Bay is the fourth team in Series history to avoid elimination with an extra-inning comeback. The first three (the 1912 Red Sox, 1986 Mets and 2011 Cardinals) all went on to win the title.
Across best-of-seven series of any kind, AP notes that only one of 43 teams to trail 3-0 has come back to win: the 2004 Red Sox against the Yankees in the American League Championship Series.
What is still unsettled
Milwaukee will start Jacob Misiorowski, the favorite for the National League Cy Young Award, in Game 5. Rays manager Kevin Cash said he had not picked a starter yet. Caminero left the game with an ailing left foot, but Cash told reporters, "He'll play tomorrow on one leg. I'll make sure of it." How limited he is will not be clear until he is on the field.
Our take
Statistics say the Rays are still a long shot, and nothing in this game changes that. But the Brewers' loss was an unforced one. They had the lead, the bullpen was shutting the door, and one bad throw let the whole inning open up. A team that has not lost in three weeks now has to answer questions about that error for another day, and in a short series, that is the kind of pressure that tends to show up. We would not call it a turning point yet. We would call it a series again.
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Picture credit: Photo: Quintin Soloviev (CC BY 4.0)
