Brewers remaining even-keeled with playoff berth in sight

ARLINGTON -- Being a big league manager means living in a constant state of unease, even for someone who doesn’t show it like Milwaukee’s Pat Murphy. His Brewers have built the best record in baseball and this week became the first team to go into a game with a chance -- albeit a complicated one that required four different games to break right -- to formally clinch a berth in the postseason.

And yet Murphy admitted to feeling a little uneasy, even before the Brewers followed their sweep of the Pirates in Pittsburgh by getting swept by the Rangers at Globe Life Field. The series and road trip concluded Wednesday with Freddy Peralta’s scoreless streak ending at 30 innings on the first of Jake Burger’s two home runs, and with Peralta balking home the go-ahead run in the third inning of a 6-3 Milwaukee loss.

It marked the first time the Brewers were on the wrong side of a sweep since they were torpedoed by the Yankees’ unique bats in the opening series of the season.

“We haven’t had too many of these,” Murphy said. “In the last two years, this is the third time we’ve been swept, right? It stinks, but I don’t think there’s any team in baseball that has played 300 games and been swept three times. I still love our guys and am proud of our guys. It’s not a lack of effort, guys. It’s not letting down. It’s maybe the opposite. They’re exhausted and they’re beat up and things did not go our way this week. You guys saw it. That has to happen sometimes in baseball.

“I’m not saying it’s luck. I credit the Rangers. They were better and they executed at the right times and we just didn’t.”

Murphy felt snake-bit all three days, like in Tuesday’s 5-4 loss when the Brewers (89-58) piled up hard contact at the plate with little to show for it, and Wednesday when Brice Turang and Jackson Chourio greeted Rangers starter Merrill Kelly with back-to-back home runs for a 2-0 lead eight pitches into the afternoon, then saw it get away from Peralta by the third.

Of course, that rally started with a single from Rangers center fielder Michael Helman, a well-traveled 29-year-old rookie who hit and fielded like a Hall of Famer all week. But Peralta thought he had things back in order on a strike-'em-out, throw-'em-out double play against Josh Smith, only to see that home plate umpire Lance Barrett had called ball four. The Rangers eventually loaded the bases, tied the game on Joc Pederson’s fielder’s choice and took the lead when Peralta, thinking Burger was about to call time, balked.

“You’re going to see people around, probably getting mad when you have a bad outing,” Peralta said after reaching 30 starts for the third consecutive season. “At the end of the day, we all want to win. You see the results at the end when you compare the good games, the bad games, the so-so. It’s part of the game.”

Murphy has been around enough baseball to know the trick to avoiding the scourge of divided attention for all 162 games. That’s what he’s on the lookout for now, with the Brewers leading the NL Central by six games over the Cubs with 15 to go.

“I heard things today about things like magic numbers and what it takes to clinch this and clinch that,” Murphy said Tuesday afternoon, when the Brewers had their first chance to punch a postseason ticket.

The skipper didn’t particularly like hearing that.

“Don’t get your mind on other stuff,” he said. “It’s hard, especially for an inexperienced group. … It’s [a] general concern that the club understands their responsibility to play every day.”

At the same time, the Brewers have put themselves in a position to keep their foot on the gas while also keeping their core players from getting gassed with plenty of baseball -- they hope -- to go. General manager Matt Arnold, one of the senior club officials who flew down to Arlington this week to be on hand for what would be a modest champagne toast in the event the Brewers clinch a playoff spot, said the club’s high-performance team has a close eye on player health at the moment, collecting game data from Statcast but also from the wearable devices that are ubiquitous in the clubhouse.

“We want to ‘win tonight’ like we always do, but also with an eye on the future and where we could be,” Arnold said. “It’s trying to bake in the feelings of the players and how they’re recovering, and integrating the different ways to measure that kind of stuff. It’s always just a balance.

“But I don’t think ‘take our foot off the gas’ is our brand at all. That’s just not who we are.”

The whole team will have a day off on Thursday before getting back to work on Friday night against the division-rival Cardinals.

This time, they hope to clink those champagne glasses.

“There’s no world in which we thought this was going to be an easy thing,” Arnold said. “What we’re trying to do is very, very difficult. This time of year, you can feel it. Hopefully, there is more good baseball ahead of us.”