MILWAUKEE -- Brewers manager Pat Murphy leaned into Brice Turang’s ear and suggested what Turang was already thinking.
“It’s a good idea to put a bunt down the first-base line right here, and we’ll win the game,” Murphy told his second baseman.
He even offered Turang a tip: “It’s going to be a breaking ball.”
Turang nodded and went to home plate. Royals reliever Sam Long supplied a slider, right on cue. The bunt practiced hundreds of times during Spring Training dropped so softly into the grass along the first-base line that it was as if Turang had rolled it with his hand, and Oliver Dunn scampered home from third base for a 3-2 Brewers walk-off win over the Royals in 11 innings on Wednesday at American Family Field.
It was too late to make a winner of Freddy Peralta after the Brewers ace completed eight innings for the first time in six years, but it was just in time to salvage what had been an 0-for-5, three-strikeout afternoon for Turang and to give the Brewers a second consecutive victory on the heels of a four-game losing streak to start their season.
“Sick play, right?” said Dunn. “That’s a fun way to end a game.”
Before the bunt, the Brewers were feeling a little sick at the thought of squandering one of Peralta’s best starts in a Brewers uniform. He retired the final 19 hitters he faced and equaled his career high for innings pitched -- Peralta threw eight innings in Cincinnati in April 2019 in his 16th career start -- while allowing only two hits with no walks and eight strikeouts.
It was the sort of bulk the Brewers so badly needed with six Major League starters on the injured list and another, veteran Jose Quintana, still building up in extended Spring Training.
“He was as good as I’ve seen him in I don’t know how many years,” Murphy said. “That is a good baseball team over there. That’s a playoff-bound baseball team. They have great pitching, they have what it takes. They’ve got maybe the top player in baseball in Bobby Witt Jr. and they play right. That’s a really good team, and that’s why I’m so excited, because we battled.
“That’s how we have to be. We have to be relentless and never give in.”
They had to be resilient because it wasn’t a particularly good day at the plate. The Brewers struck out 17 times and went 2-for-14 with runners in scoring position. Some of the most painful of those outs came in the seventh inning, when the Brewers had runners at second and third base with nobody out but did not score, and in the 10th, when Jackson Chourio, who’d staked the Brewers to an early 1-0 lead with his first home run of the season, doubled home a run to keep the game alive, only to see his teammates waste a bases-loaded, no-out threat later in the same half-inning.
But in the 11th, after Brewers lefty Jared Koenig kept Kansas City off the board, Milwaukee put on the pressure again. Garrett Mitchell, having tried twice to bunt the free runner over and come up empty, managed a groundout to the right side that put the winning runner -- Dunn -- 90 feet from home.
Joey Ortiz then walked to bring up Turang, who’d looked uncomfortable in the batter’s box against Royals left-handed starter Cole Ragans and now faced another lefty in Long with the game on the line. The whole stadium knew a bunt was possible, or even likely.
Turang executed it anyway.
“It was a perfect bunt,” said Royals left fielder Cavan Biggio. “Nothing you could really do, even if you did anticipate it. He put it in a perfect spot. Hat off to him.”
“It was a good bunt,” Long said. “Once I was approaching the ball, I was like, [shoot].”
Dunn was ready. At third, Brewers coach Jason Lane alerted Dunn to the likelihood of a safety squeeze.
“Basically, you’re seeing it on the ground. Direction doesn’t matter,” Dunn said. “You’re aggressive, but it’s not a full suicide squeeze in the sense that if he pops it up, I’m halfway down the line. … But it was a perfect bunt, exactly the way you draw it up. When it’s executed like that, it’s completely indefensible.”
Added Koenig, one of three Brewers relievers who kept the game close: “[Dunn] had a great read, too. He saw it and he was gone. They had no chance.”
For Turang, it was a payoff for keeping his head up after a tough start. You could say the same for the Brewers, who came back from their first 0-4 start in a decade to win the series.
“Even me, I was feeling a little bit like, ‘Dang, we need to do something as a team to feel better,’” Peralta said. “I think it was the first time since I’ve been here that we started a season that way. But I told some people, ‘Take it easy, calm down, we’re only starting.’ Now we’re seeing what we want to see.”
“You can’t dwell on the past, you just have to keep moving forward,” Turang said. “When days go like that, you kind of know that at some point in the game, your name is going to be called.”