Box Score
In what was surely the longest game of baseball ever played, a matchup of aces turned into a laugher quickly when neither Freddy Peralta nor Corbin Burnes, nor, it turned out, anyone else could get anybody out. This game had 21 total runs scored, 25 hits, three errors, and five walks by the time it reached the bottom of the fifth inning, a contest that meandered deep into the Arizona night.
The important thing, of course, is that no one got hurt, and both teams fulfilled that objective (despite a mysterious mid-inning exit by Joey Ortiz that may or may not have been bathroom-related and seemed to crack up his teammates).
The most important aspects of the first five innings can be summed up thusly: Ketel Marte, Jackson Chourio, and William Contreras are very good at hitting. Peralta looked kind of terrible, in all honesty: his final line consisted of 3 1⁄3 innings, eight hits, ten runs, four walks, and five strikeouts, but he got himself comfortably to about 90 pitches and he occasionally flashed some nasty breaking stuff.
After Abner Uribe had a rough outing (he got three outs across two innings, allowed two inherited runners to score, then allowed three more runs that were charged solely to him), Craig Yoho temporarily settled things down in the sixth. But even Yoho, who has been mostly untouchable in the spring, got touched up in the seventh, even though no one really hit the ball hard, it was just as series of seeing-eye singles that scored another run for Arizona, and a second was charged to Yoho after he was out of the game on a single allowed by Grant Anderson.
Convinced that the game, as it reached its third hour, hadn’t gone on long enough, the Brewers added a ninth run with a two-out rally in the bottom of the seventh when Black doubled and Durbin, Brewer Hicklen, and Darrien Miller all walked. Still convinced that the game wasn’t long enough, Anderson then came back out for the eighth, got the first two outs, then walked three straight batters and needed to be removed. Then Kaleb Bowman, the pitcher who replaced him, walked a guy too before getting the third out, so it was 16-9 for those keeping track.
The Woo Boys emerged as it got late, and that might be the reason that things finally started moving as the Brewers went down 1-2-3 in the bottom of the 8th and Nick Merkel worked a fairly quick top of the ninth, when he worked around a walk and benefitted from a great catch against the wall by Luis Lara.
The game did, eventually, end, with some gaudy offensive numbers: Durbin was 2-for-4 with a couple runs, a walk, and an RBI double, Chourio was 2-for-4 with two runs scored and an RBI (to keep his batting average above .475), and Hoskins had two hits, but the big star for Milwaukee was William Contreras, who scaled balls on the way to a 4-for-4 outing with a double and two RBI. On the position battle side of things, Bauers was 1-for-3 with a run and an RBI and Black was 1-for-4 with a walk, a double (off a lefty!), an RBI, and a run scored. The Brewers finished with nine runs on 14 hits, and they got those runs without the benefit of a homer. Arizona scored 16 on 18 hits, two of which were first-inning homers off of Peralta.
Milwaukee is back in action tomorrow at 3 p.m. central against the Athletics, when Jose Quintana will make his second appearance of the spring.
