PITTSBURGH -- Brewers manager Pat Murphy opened with a question on Sunday evening after his team secured a multi-run comeback victory for the first time this season, and finally won a game it trailed after seven innings.
“Does anybody know how to spell 'remnants?'” Murphy asked after a 6-5 win over the Pirates at PNC Park. “That’s a good word, remnants.”
Murphy had that word at the front of his mind after seeing remnants of the team the Brewers were last season, when they won another National League Central title amid a managerial transition, roster turnover and projection models proclaiming it was another team’s time. This year, the Brewers are 26-28, and Murphy has worried aloud that they seem to have lost some of their “edge.”
Then came Sunday, when his club took a 3-0 lead in the first inning, saw it turn into a 5-3 deficit by the seventh and won anyway. Murphy rattled off remnants, like rookie third baseman Caleb Durbin fouling off five straight pitches before delivering the game-tying two-run double on an 0-2 count in the eighth inning. Brice Turang followed with a go-ahead double amid a shaky game at second base and a 1-for-24 funk. Reliever Abner Uribe overcame losing not one but two one-run leads two nights earlier to send this one-run lead to the ninth inning.
All after rookie starter Logan Henderson endured a 31-pitch second inning and carried a 3-1 lead through the fifth without his good changeup.
“We didn’t have to win this game, the way it was going,” Murphy said. “Three [runs] in the first, and then we’re looking behind us. We’ve seen this a bunch this year. I was really, just, sick to my stomach.”
A feisty comeback was the cure.
“It was what was needed,” Murphy said. “We used to be a team that did what was needed. That’s how we rolled. We played every pitch. It seems because we haven’t lived up to our own expectations, we’ve kind of played not to lose instead of just to win. … To see this today, it gives a little bit of, ‘Yeah, that’s how we’ve got to play.’”
Take Turang, who was 0-for-3 in the game and hitting .171 in May after hitting .317 in March and April, but won a game by following Durbin’s tying hit in the eighth with a go-ahead hit off Pirates reliever Ryan Borucki.
“I’m not even really scuffling. I’m hitting balls hard, just right to people,” Turang said. “You feel like every ball you hit hard is right to someone and every ball you don’t hit hard is right to someone. You just have to keep moving forward, because the more you try, you can go down a big rabbit hole. I feel good. I feel really comfortable at the plate.”
Turang was a fitting hero for a game all about comebacks. With Henderson bidding to become the first pitcher in more than a decade to win the first four appearances of his Major League career, Turang twice let pickoff attempts tick off his glove in a long second inning. Both times, Henderson and the Brewers had the Pirates’ Alexander Canario dead to rights.
Henderson didn’t yield a run in that inning, but he did expend 31 pitches to get through it, which contributed to his exit after the fifth with a 3-1 lead. That contributed to yet more work for an already hard-worked bullpen, starting with right-hander Nick Mears and left-hander Jared Koenig, who surrendered two runs apiece as a lead became a deficit.
But Turang and the Brewers had answers, reclaiming the lead in the eighth and then holding it with, of all things, a pickoff at second base. It was Uribe on the mound this time with Tommy Pham at second after a line drive single up the middle that glanced off the glove of a leaping Turang -- a play he made many times during his Gold and Platinum Glove Award-winning 2024 season -- followed by a balk.
Uribe spun around and fired a fastball to Turang, who fielded it cleanly and applied the tag for a crucial out of what became a scoreless inning.
“That was this week’s focus -- we’re holding runners at second base and we’re going to get pitchers to make that move,” said Murphy. “They’ve done an incredible job of trying to coach these guys to call that play. And it worked out.”
The Brewers hope it’s the first of more comebacks to come.
“Being able to take that confidence and know that we can do it, and keep pushing forward,” Turang said. “We’ve got a good team. It’s just putting the pieces together.”