LOS ANGELES — He battled Blake Snell for 11 pitches. The last one became a two-run homer that put the Milwaukee Brewers ahead in the seventh inning of Game 3 of the National League Championship Series at Dodger Stadium.
A night later, Jake Bauers doubled home two runs in Game 4 as Milwaukee rallied from a 4-0 deficit. The Brewers won 6-4 Thursday to finish a sweep of the two-time defending champion Dodgers and reach the World Series for the first time since 1982.
Bauers was named NLCS MVP, the first LCS MVP in Brewers history. He went 4-for-14 with a homer and six RBIs. In Game 2, his 12-pitch walk in the third inning helped knock out Yoshinobu Yamamoto.
After the clincher, he described the mood in the Brewers’ dugout.
“There was never a doubt in that dugout what was going to happen,” Bauers said. “We knew we were going to win.”
The 31-year-old first baseman nearly left the game two years ago. He hit .199 with 118 strikeouts in 346 at-bats for Milwaukee in 2024 and planned to retire. His wife, Lauren, was returning to teaching full time. Days later, she learned she was pregnant with their second child.
“Obviously, she wasn’t going back to work, so we decided I was going to keep playing,” Bauers told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “We needed health insurance.”
The breakout Milwaukee waited for
Bauers hit .235 in 85 games in 2025. This season, he broke through.
He batted .266/.389/.484 with 26 homers, 22 doubles, 86 RBIs, 93 runs and 11 stolen bases in 144 games. His OPS+ was 140, and he produced 3.3 WAR. Before 2026, his career WAR was negative.
Milwaukee kept him for three seasons, through a .199 year and a part-time year, before the payoff. He hit 45 homers across those three seasons with a .785 OPS.
The Yankees had him first. And his October has renewed a familiar question in the Bronx about how the club identifies, develops and lets go of talent.
What happened in New York
The Yankees acquired Bauers from Cincinnati in June 2022. He had become a free agent after the 2021 season and never reached the majors with the Reds.
The Yankees’ development staff went to work on his swing. Joe Migliaccio, the club’s minor league hitting coordinator, told The Athletic in 2023 that the problem was a steep swing that produced too many whiffs, pop-ups and grounders.
“Bauers has flattened his bat path over the past year,” Migliaccio said.
The change showed up at Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre. Bauers opened 2023 hitting .359 with a 1.382 OPS and 11 homers in 24 games. The Yankees called him up in late April with Aaron Judge on the injured list.
He became a useful bench piece. Aaron Boone praised him that September.
“He’s kind of been a revelation for us,” Boone said.
The numbers never matched the moments. Bauers hit .202 with 12 homers and a .693 OPS in 84 games and 272 plate appearances. He finished at minus-0.9 WAR. In November 2023, the Yankees traded him to Milwaukee for minor league outfielders Jace Avina and Brian Sanchez.
Dodger Stadium, again
Bauers’ best Yankees night and his biggest Brewers night came in the same ballpark.
On June 3, 2023, he homered twice for the Yankees at Dodger Stadium. That was also the day Judge injured his right big toe crashing into the outfield wall there, an injury that cost the Yankees their best hitter for nearly two months.
Three Octobers later, Bauers delivered the go-ahead homer in Game 3 and two more RBIs in the Game 4 clincher on the same field.
The case for and against the Yankees
The Yankees’ defense is simple. Bauers struck out 118 times in 2024 and hit .199 after leaving New York. Milwaukee needed two more years to unlock him. Nothing in his Yankees line suggested a 140 OPS+ hitter.
The return also has value. Avina, 23, hit 21 homers with an .817 OPS and is a candidate for the Scranton outfield in 2027.
But Bauers fits a skill the Yankees lacked in 2026. His .389 on-base percentage was 78 points higher than the Yankees’ team mark of .311, according to Baseball-Reference. He drew walks and worked counts in October, the exact approach the Yankees could not sustain in a three-game ALDS loss to Tampa Bay.
The pattern has come up before. The Yankees sold catcher Luis Torrens to the Mets in 2024, and he developed into a starting-caliber catcher there, as New York Post columnist Joel Sherman noted recently. Sherman described Torrens as the ideal partner for Austin Wells.
The Yankees’ 2026 first basemen included Ben Rice, who produced 3.7 WAR, and Paul Goldschmidt, who posted a 111 OPS+ on a one-year deal. Bauers’ 140 OPS+ outpaced Goldschmidt’s by 29 points.
Where things stand
Bauers is set to become a free agent after the World Series. The Brewers will host Game 1 on Oct. 23. Cleveland leads Tampa Bay 2-1 in the ALCS.
For the Yankees, his MVP run lands as they weigh first base and designated hitter decisions, with Goldschmidt a free agent and Luis García Jr. a possible trade chip.
The Yankees did not keep the hitter Bauers became. The open question is whether their next one gets the time Milwaukee gave him.
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