A year ago, the Los Angeles Dodgers swept the Milwaukee Brewers out of the National League Championship Series in four straight games on their way to a World Series title. On October 15, at Dodger Stadium, the exact same two teams delivered the exact opposite result. The Brewers rallied from an early four-run deficit to beat the Dodgers 6-4 in Game 4, completing a stunning four-game sweep of their own and sending Milwaukee to the World Series for the first time in 44 years. The Dodgers’ bid for a third consecutive championship ended having not won a single game in the series that was supposed to be the final hurdle before the title round.
The defeat was not for lack of a signature moment. Shohei Ohtani, playing through a knee injury and arm soreness that had been an open question all series, put the Dodgers up 4-0 with a three-run home run in the second inning. For a few innings, it looked like the kind of performance that decides a series almost by itself. Instead, it became the backdrop for one of the more complete collapses of the Dodgers’ recent postseason history, and the quiet, uneventful end to the rookie season of a Korean infielder who never got off the bench to see any of it.
A Four-Run Lead Built by One Swing
The damage started early. In the second inning, with the Dodgers already on the board, Ohtani drove a pitch out of the ballpark for a three-run home run that pushed the lead to 4-0. Given everything that had been reported about his physical condition heading into the game — a knee that wasn’t fully right, arm soreness that had limited him in other roles — the swing was the kind of moment both managers would later point to as proof of what he’s capable of even at less than 100 percent. For a home crowd hoping to watch their team punch a ticket to a third straight World Series, it was about as good a start as anyone could have asked for.
It did not hold. Milwaukee chipped away methodically rather than dramatically, scoring two runs in the fourth inning and two more in the fifth to pull even at 4-4. There was no signature blow in the comeback’s early stages, just a lineup grinding down a lead run by run until the game was tied entering the middle innings — the sort of response that puts enormous pressure on a home bullpen that no longer has the cushion of a laugher to work with.
The Bullpen Moments That Decided It
With the score level, the game turned into exactly the kind of tight, high-leverage contest where a single mistake pitch changes everything. In the sixth inning, Dodgers reliever Tanner Scott surrendered a go-ahead solo home run that put Milwaukee in front, 5-4. The Dodgers never got the lead back. In the ninth, closer Edwin Diaz allowed another solo home run, an insurance run that stretched the final margin to 6-4 and left no room for a miracle in the bottom of the inning.
Two solo home runs, conceded by two different relievers in two different innings, were enough to turn a comfortable four-run cushion into a series-ending loss. It’s a reminder of how postseason baseball can hinge on isolated pitches rather than sustained dominance — Milwaukee didn’t need to blow the Dodgers out to finish the sweep, just to find the one mistake pitch in the sixth and another in the ninth.
A Lineup That Went Cold at the Worst Time
Beyond the two home runs that decided Game 4, the series loss was also a story of opportunities the Dodgers simply didn’t convert. Across the full four games, the Dodgers’ lineup went just 5-for-43 with runners in scoring position — a rate of offensive futility that, over a full series, is nearly impossible to overcome regardless of pitching or defense. Chances were there. Cashing them in was the problem, and against a Brewers pitching staff that didn’t need to be flawless because the Dodgers’ bats weren’t delivering when it mattered, that gap proved decisive.
It’s worth pointing out how directly this inverts last year’s storyline. In the 2025 NLCS, it was the Dodgers doing the sweeping, riding their lineup to four straight wins over this same Milwaukee team on the way to a championship. One year and the same two franchises later, the roles flipped entirely — and not in a close, hard-fought series that happened to end 4-0, but in a series where the team doing the sweeping lost a potential laugher and still finished the job.
The shape of the sweep itself is part of what makes it sting for Los Angeles. A series in which a team loses four straight by lopsided scores is one thing — the story there is simply that the other team was better, start to finish. This was a different kind of sweep: a club building leads, including a four-run cushion in the very game that eliminated it, and still finding a way to lose every single contest. That pattern, repeated across a four-game set, points to something more specific than bad luck in one inning. It suggests a bullpen that couldn’t protect leads once games tightened, and a lineup that could build an advantage in the early innings but couldn’t add to it once the opponent started trading runs in the middle frames.
What Dave Roberts Said Afterward
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts didn’t single out any one player in his postgame comments. Reporters noted that he expressed respect for Ohtani specifically, for playing through a body that was clearly not at full strength and still delivering the biggest swing of the game. But when it came to assigning responsibility for the loss and the series, Roberts was consistent: the outcome belonged to the team as a whole, not to any individual moment or any one reliever’s mistake pitch. Both managers, for what it’s worth, identified Ohtani as the best player on the field that night — a notable bit of common ground between a winning and a losing dugout on the night a season ended.
44 Years in the Making for Milwaukee
For the Brewers, the context is almost the inverse of everything written above. Milwaukee’s last appearance in a World Series came in 1982, when the franchise lost to the St. Louis Cardinals in seven games. Forty-four years is long enough that essentially no active player on this Brewers roster, and very few of their fans in the stands at Dodger Stadium, were alive to see it happen. Beating the two-time defending champion on the road, in a series where the opponent led by four runs in the very first game of the set, gives this pennant a different texture than a conventional underdog story — Milwaukee didn’t survive a close series against a lesser team. It dismantled, game by game, the team that had just swept it the year before and was trying to become the first repeat-repeat champion in a generation.
That’s the shape of the story for American readers who already know both franchises well. But there was a smaller, quieter subplot running underneath the series the entire time, one that mattered far more in Seoul and across Korean sports media than it did in Los Angeles or Milwaukee — and it had nothing to do with who won.
The Player Who Never Left the Dugout
Dodgers infielder Kim Hye-seong, a rookie import from South Korea’s KBO League, was left off the Dodgers’ 26-man roster for the entire NLCS. Reports indicated that a fully healthy Miguel Rojas, recovered from a back issue that had been a lingering concern, factored directly into that decision — the Dodgers chose roster stability at Rojas’s position over carrying Kim through the series. The result: Kim did not appear in any of the four NLCS games. His season — and with it, his rookie postseason experience in Major League Baseball — ended the moment the Dodgers’ season did, without him ever getting the chance to step onto the field in the series.
To an American audience, a benched utility infielder’s lack of playing time in a series his team lost might seem like a footnote barely worth mentioning. But the attention paid to Kim’s roster status — tracked, reported, and debated by Korean sports outlets essentially every single day of this postseason — reflects something closer to how a home broadcast will linger on a single countryman’s face in the stands during a World Cup match, even if that player never gets off the bench. It isn’t really about the Dodgers-Brewers series as a whole for that audience. It’s about the one player inside it who carries a home country’s attention with him, whether he’s rounding the bases or watching from the dugout rail.
Kim came to Major League Baseball out of the KBO’s Kiwoom Heroes organization, part of a wave of Korean players making the jump to North America’s top league in recent years. His first full big-league season was an uneven one by the numbers: a late-May demotion to Triple-A Oklahoma City kept him out of the majors for a significant stretch, and he split most of the year between the two levels before returning when rosters expanded in September. None of that trajectory is unusual for a young player adjusting to a new league and a new country. What made this particular ending notable wasn’t a bad season by itself — it was that the season’s final chapter involved no games at all, just a healthy scratch from the biggest stage his team reached, followed by elimination.
The roster math behind that decision is straightforward once laid out. Rojas, a veteran infielder who has spent years as exactly the kind of experienced bench piece postseason rosters are built around, had been dealing with a back issue of his own. Once he was declared fully healthy, the Dodgers had a choice to make about which infielder would occupy the final bench spot behind their everyday lineup, and they chose experience and defensive certainty over a rookie still finding his footing at the highest level. It’s a decision that happens on nearly every postseason roster in some form — a team favoring a known quantity over an unproven one when the margin for error shrinks to a single elimination format. For Kim, it simply meant watching from a few feet away rather than being on the field for any of it.
That kind of ending is a familiar shape in the story of players making the jump from Asian leagues to Major League Baseball. The transition rarely runs in a straight line upward. A rookie season frequently includes stretches in the high minors, bursts of big-league playing time around injuries or roster needs elsewhere, and, if the parent club is good enough to make a long postseason run, a real chance that the final weeks of the year are spent watching rather than playing. None of that erases what Kim accomplished simply by being on a 40-man roster for a team that went all the way to the NLCS. It does mean that his first taste of October baseball in the United States was an entirely passive one — valuable experience in the clubhouse and dugout, but nothing that will show up in a box score.
Two Seasons, Two Opposite Endings
There’s a tidy symmetry to how this NLCS bookends the last twelve months for these two organizations. Last October, the Dodgers were the team sweeping, celebrating, and advancing toward a championship, while Milwaukee packed up early. This October, every part of that outcome reversed — same two teams, same format, same number of games, completely opposite result. Baseball offers that kind of exact rematch only rarely, and when it does, the whiplash tends to make both outcomes feel more dramatic than either would in isolation. A team that swept its way to a title one year and gets swept by the identical opponent the next isn’t just losing a series; it’s losing the exact series it had just won, against the exact team it had just beaten.
For Milwaukee, the 44-year wait is over, and the Brewers now turn to preparing for a World Series appearance most of their current roster has never experienced at this level. For the Dodgers, the questions this winter will center on a lineup that went cold at the worst possible time and a bullpen that couldn’t hold a four-run cushion once the game tightened. And for Kim Hye-seong, there’s a simpler, smaller question hanging over an otherwise quiet ending: whether a healthy, active roster spot in next year’s postseason is a story he gets to tell differently.