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The National League Championship Series is set. The Los Angeles Dodgers closed out the Atlanta Braves with a 4-1 win in Game 4 on Wednesday to take their Division Series three games to one, and the Milwaukee Brewers finished the San Diego Padres by the same score and the same series margin to complete a night of eliminations.
Los Angeles had seized control of its series in Game 3 at Truist Park, riding seven dominant innings from Yoshinobu Yamamoto — one run, four hits, ten strikeouts — to a 3-1 win built on fourth-inning home runs by Kiké Hernández and Freddie Freeman. Freeman's blast was the 18th postseason homer of his career, moving him into a tie for tenth on the all-time list. Atlanta's bats never solved the moment: five hits in Game 3, scoreless in six at-bats with runners in scoring position, and a season that ended with Edwin Díaz working around a leadoff double to close the door.
Wednesday's clincher followed the same script — pitching first, power when needed — and sent the Dodgers back to the NLCS as the team nobody wanted to face in October.
Milwaukee's path was narrower. The Brewers, the National League's top seed, watched San Diego claw back into the series in Game 3 at Petco Park: Fernando Tatis Jr. and Manny Machado built an early lead, Milwaukee tied it on a William Contreras homer and a Jackson Chourio sacrifice fly, and Jake Cronenworth's fifth-inning homer plus a sixth-inning insurance run held up for a 4-3 Padres win, sealed when Xander Bogaerts turned a game-ending double play. Christian Yelich's late RBI single had pulled Milwaukee within one.
But the Brewers answered at home in Game 4, winning 3-1 to end the series and move within four wins of the World Series. For San Diego, another talented season ends in the Division Series; for Milwaukee, the league's best regular-season record finally has the October result to match.
The NLCS now pairs the Dodgers' star power and rotation depth against a Brewers club built on pitching, defence and relentless at-bats. Game 1 arrives with storylines everywhere: Freeman facing the franchise he once led, Milwaukee's young core against the sport's biggest payroll, and two fan bases that have watched October break their hearts in opposite ways.
In the American League, the Division Series continue, with Tampa Bay already through and Cleveland and Chicago playing on. The National League, though, is down to two — and both earned it the hard way.
Milwaukee's Game 4 response deserves its place in the story. A top seed that loses Game 3 on the road, watches its 2-0 series lead become a coin flip, and then flies home to end matters 3-1 has passed October's character test. The Brewers' rotation depth and bullpen — the architecture of their regular season — reasserted itself exactly when the Padres' star-driven lineup needed one more night. San Diego's winter will feature the usual questions about a payroll that keeps producing Septembers instead of parades.
Los Angeles, by contrast, has converted its wealth into the thing money is supposed to buy in October: margin for error. Yamamoto's Game 3 was a reminder that the Dodgers can win a series with pitching when their lineup idles, and win the next with power when it does not. Freeman, the former Brave, authoring the decisive blows against Atlanta added the cruelty October specialises in — and burnished a postseason résumé, 18 career playoff home runs now, that is quietly becoming one of the era's best.
The championship series begins with both clubs rested and their rotations set. It is, on paper, the National League's richest team against its most efficient one. October usually finds a way to make that distinction irrelevant by the second game.
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