For most of the season, the Milwaukee Brewers and Los Angeles Dodgers have been the two best teams in baseball.
The Brewers won the season series over the Dodgers on Sunday, securing a tiebreaker should the two teams finish with the same record. The Brewers now have a three-game lead over the Dodgers for the best record in baseball and the National League's top seed.
The two teams seem destined to meet again in October, but the Dodgers have some work to do to get back on track.
“We haven’t been good,” Max Muncy said after Sunday's 6-2 loss, per The Athletic's Katie Woo. “It’s one of those stretches. We need urgency. We need to fix some things. But ultimately, it still is baseball. Things like this are going to happen. We very easily could win the next two weeks in a row, and this gets put in the rearview mirror.”
The Dodgers' offense, defense and pitching have all taken a dive in the last month. The good news is, they have a roster full of All-Stars and have Tyler Glasnow and Will Smith returning soon as well. Shohei Ohtani's return to the rotation should also help out a very taxed bullpen that is operating a man down thanks to a six-man rotation. Ohtani's return will still keep the Dodgers in a six-man rotation, but it will give them an extra bullpen arm since he does not count as one of the 13 pitchers on the roster.
The team knows that Sunday's result could decide whether they have to play a Game 7 in Milwaukee or not.
“Today really sucked,” Muncy agreed. “It was a big game. We kind of needed to win this one, and we didn’t.”