October 9, 1981: With backs to wall, Brewers earn franchise’s first postseason win in Game 3 of ALDS

Going into Game Three of the 1981 American League Division Series, the Milwaukee Brewers faced a challenge: Make history, or go home.

The Brewers – founded as the Seattle Pilots in 1969 – earned their first postseason berth in the strike-altered 1981 season. But the New York Yankees beat the Brewers in Milwaukee in the first two games of the best-of-five Division Series.

The “Brew Crew” rose to the challenge in Game Three and posted the franchise’s first playoff win on the road in a tight game. Ace reliever Rollie Fingers blew a 3-1 lead in the seventh inning before a home run by Paul Molitor took him off the hook. Fingers closed with two shutout innings as the Brewers hung on for a 5-3 victory.

The 1981 season, sundered by a two-month players strike that began in June, was divided into two halves. A special first round of playoffs – the Division Series – was added, pitting the first-half and second-half champions of each division against each other. The winners of each Division Series then met in the league Championship Series.

The Yankees, managed at the time by Gene Michael, won the AL East Division in the first half with a 34-22 record. The team slumped all the way to sixth place in the second half, with a 25-26 record, and Michael gave way to Bob Lemon in early September.1

Lemon had replaced Billy Martin as manager in July 1978 and led the resurgent New Yorkers to their second straight World Series title.2 Lemon couldn’t spark a similar turnaround in 1981, posting a regular-season record of 11-14.

Manager Buck Rodgers’ Brewers had been solid contenders for the first-half title, finishing in third place at 31-25, three games out of first. As the Yankees sagged, Milwaukee stepped up, narrowly outpacing the Boston Red Sox, Detroit Tigers, and Baltimore Orioles for the second-half title with a 31-22 record.3 For the full season, the Brewers’ 62-47 record was best in the AL East, one game ahead of Baltimore and two ahead of New York and Detroit.4

While 1981 marked the Brewers’ first trip to the playoffs, it was not their city’s first postseason experience. The 1957 Milwaukee Braves had won the World Series, while the 1958 Braves won the National League pennant before losing the World Series.5 The Braves, though, had erased much of the good feeling associated with their success by abandoning Milwaukee for Atlanta after the 1965 season.

The Yankees had been the Braves’ opponents in both World Series appearances, and they spoiled the first two games of the Brewers’ first postseason. In Game One of the ALDS, the Yankees made a four-run fourth inning stand up in an eventual 5-3 win. In Game Two, rookie lefty Dave Righetti’s six shutout frames and homers by Lou Piniella and Reggie Jackson gave New York a 3-0 victory.

In Game Three, the Brewers sent lefty Randy Lerch to the mound on his 27th birthday. A former Phillies prospect who’d pitched for Philadelphia in the 1978 National League Championship Series, Lerch went 7-9 with a 4.31 ERA in 23 games in 1981, including 18 starts.6 He’d started and lost against the Yankees once before, on September 7, allowing eight hits and four earned runs in 6⅓ innings. Lerch was suffering symptoms of the flu, but he started instead of Pete Vuckovich because Vuckovich was even sicker.7

The Yankees started 38-year-old lefty Tommy John. In his 18th big-league season – and sixth since returning in 1976 from Dr. Frank Jobe’s innovative elbow surgery – John posted a 9-8 record and a 2.63 ERA in 20 games, all starts. He’d started against Milwaukee twice in the regular season and recorded complete-game wins both times.8 Since joining the Yankees in 1979, he’d beaten the Brewers five times without a loss.9

John’s 2½-year-old son, Travis, threw out the first pitch in a heartwarming ceremony.10 The boy’s story was nationally known in the autumn of 1981: He had fallen from a third-floor window in August and spent nearly a month in critical condition. By October 9 he had recovered. Dressed in a miniature set of Yankees pinstripes, he walked to the pitcher’s mound accompanied by his mother, Sally; Reggie Jackson; and rousing applause.11

On a windy, cool Friday night, 54,171 fans packed Yankee Stadium.12 The offenses stayed largely quiet for the first three innings. Milwaukee mustered only a leadoff single by Molitor in the first. The Yankees wasted a two-out double by Dave Winfield in the first and walks to Graig Nettles and Bob Watson in the second.

Both teams stirred in the fourth. Molitor singled again to lead off the top of the inning, and two groundouts moved him to third. After Ted Simmons walked, Jackson made a diving catch of Gorman Thomas’s fly to right field to end the threat.

Winfield led off the bottom half with his second hit, a single. Lerch retired Jackson and Piniella, then handed Nettles another walk. Watson had driven in just 12 runs in 59 games during the regular season, but he came through with a full-count single to center field that scored Winfield with the game’s first run. The hit moved Nettles to third, where – with Dwight Bernard throwing in the Brewers bullpen13 – Larry Milbourne stranded him with a groundout.

In the fifth inning, the Yankee Stadium scoreboard flashed a message that the next round of the AL playoffs would begin there on Tuesday. The declaration struck Brewers fans as premature.14

The bottom of the sixth ended with a controversial call by third-base umpire Mike Reilly. With one out and Winfield on first after a walk, Piniella hit a high chop back to the mound on a hit-and-run play. Lerch threw to first base to retire Piniella. Never slowing, Winfield tried to take third base, but a throw from first baseman Cecil Cooper to shortstop Robin Yount retired him on a bang-bang play for the third out.15 The ABC-TV broadcast team agreed with Reilly’s call; Winfield and the Yankees’ fans did not.

Cooper led off the seventh with a sharp single off Watson’s glove, only the Brewers’ third hit. While attention was focused on first base, a fan with a blackjack in his pocket leapt out of the third-base stands and jumped Reilly from behind. Nettles, beefy umpire Ken Kaiser, and other players subdued the man, but the attack briefly interrupted play.16 A few pitches later, John hung a forkball to Simmons, who drove it over the left-field fence to give Milwaukee a 2-1 lead.17 Thomas singled to left, advanced to second on a sacrifice, and scored on a single to right-center by Sal Bando for a 3-1 Brewers advantage.

Fingers replaced Lerch to start the seventh; his 28 saves led the AL and accounted for 45 percent of the Brewers’ wins. With one out, Watson, Milbourne, Rick Cerone, and Willie Randolph hit consecutive singles, driving in two runs to tie the game.18 Jerry Mumphrey grounded into a force play at second, moving lead runner Cerone to third. Winfield – a former teammate of Fingers in San Diego – struck out.19

That out proved to be crucial. Leading off the eighth, Molitor homered on a ball almost caught by the 6-foot-6 Winfield, who leapt most of the way into the left-field stands in pursuit.20 After Yount singled off Nettles’ glove, John gave way to another veteran lefty, 37-year-old Rudy May. Cooper popped up a bunt attempt to May, who caught it and then threw the ball away trying to catch Yount off first. Yount advanced to second on the error, took third on a passed ball, and scored on a ringing double by Simmons to left-center for a 5-3 Brewers lead.21

In the eighth, the Yankees got a one-out pinch single from Oscar Gamble but no more. In the ninth, Fingers threw a third strike past Milbourne, retired Cerone on a fly to left, and struck out Randolph swinging to wrap up the game in 2 hours and 39 minutes.22 Fingers got the win, while John took the loss.

Rodgers said that the Brewers’ eighth-inning rally gave him hope: “I knew when we got the lead again that Rollie wouldn’t lose it again.” And Molitor, who’d hit only two homers in the regular season, warned of a resurgence: “I think the pressure is on the Yankees. I don’t think we’re tight anymore.”23

Some in New York second-guessed Lemon for his bullpen management. Lemon had used reliever Ron Davis and closer Rich Gossage in each of the first two games, making them unavailable for Game Three.24

Milwaukee won Game Four in an all-bullpen-hands-on-deck performance, but the Yankees took the series with a decisive 7-3 win in Game Five. The Yankees beat Oakland in the ALCS before losing the World Series to the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Brewers reached the World Series in 1982, losing to the St. Louis Cardinals.25

Acknowledgments

This story was fact-checked by Thomas Merrick and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Sources and photo credit

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author used the Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org websites for general player, team, and season data and the box scores for this game. The author also reviewed the ABC-TV broadcast of the game, which was available on YouTube at the time of writing.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/NYA/NYA198110090.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1981/B10090NYA1981.htm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKcmGi6asfQ

Image of 1981 Topps Traded card #761 downloaded from the Trading Card Database.

Notes

1 Reasons for New York’s poor performance included injuries to key players as well as slumps. The injured included Rich Gossage and Jerry Mumphrey, who both missed the second half of September. Underperforming hitters included Bob Watson, Dave Revering, and Oscar Gamble. Bill Madden, “Lemon: Getting Ready for Playoffs Is Main Concern,” New York Daily News, October 1, 1981: C29.

2 Martin then replaced Lemon as manager in June 1979, with Lemon given the general manager’s title. United Press International, “Lemon’s Sweet Despite a Boot Upstairs to GM,” Passaic County (New Jersey) News, June 19, 1979: 8.

3 In the second half, Boston and Detroit tied for second place at 29-23, 1½ games back, while Baltimore finished fourth at 28-23, two games back.

4 Only three teams in the major leagues had more wins than the Brewers over the full season. The Cincinnati Reds won 66 games, the Oakland A’s 64, and the eventual World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers 63.

5 Prior to October 9, 1981, the last postseason win for any Milwaukee team had occurred in Game Four of the 1958 World Series on October 5, 1958, when Warren Spahn’s two-hit shutout gave the Braves a 3-games-to-1 lead in the series. The Yankees won the next three games.

6 Lerch went 4-14 with a 5.16 ERA in 30 regular-season appearances for the World Series champion 1980 Phillies. He did not appear in that postseason.

7 Bill Brophy, “Brewers Win to Stay Alive,” Wisconsin State Journal (Madison, Wisconsin), October 10, 1981: Section 2: 1; Murray Chass, “Brewers Beat Yanks 5-3, Extend Series; A’s Sweep,” New York Times, October 10, 1981: 19.

8 John beat the Brewers 5-2 in the first game of a September 9 doubleheader, then beat them again five days later, 10-2.

9 The ABC-TV broadcast of the game included this information in a graphic shown while John was warming up before the top of the first.

10 Mike Lupica, “All Hell Broke Loose to Ruin Yankees’ Coronation Plans,” New York Daily News, October 10, 1981: 29.

11 Associated Press, “Travis John Steals the Show,” Atlantic City (New Jersey) Press, October 10, 1981: 25; ABC-TV network broadcast.

12 News reports from October 1981 and the ABC-TV game broadcast give the attendance as 54,171; Retrosheet and Baseball-Reference list it as 56,411. The ABC-TV broadcast of the game begins with a mention that the game was sold out. Baseball-Reference describes the game-time weather as 55 degrees with an 11-mph wind.

13 ABC-TV game broadcast. Bob McClure was also shown warming up during the fifth inning, though neither Bernard nor McClure was called on.

14 Brophy, “Brewers Win to Stay Alive.”

15 At the time this story was written, Retrosheet’s game account incorrectly had Winfield being retired at second base, rather than third.

16 Mike Tully (United Press International), “Brewers Defeat Yankees, 5-3,” Buffalo (New York) News, October 10, 1981: Sports Magazine: 3.

17 Lupica, “All Hell Broke Loose to Ruin Yankees’ Coronation Plans”; Tully, “Brewers Defeat Yankees, 5-3.” In the New York Times, Chass said John denied that the incident with Reilly and the fan affected him. John was allowed to take warm-up pitches after the interruption.

18 Milbourne’s single was an infield chop; Fingers and Milbourne collided at first base as Fingers tried to field the throw to first, and Fingers fell to the ground. The ABC-TV broadcast noted that Jamie Easterly was loosening in the Milwaukee bullpen during the Yankees’ seventh-inning rally.

19 Fingers and Winfield were Padres teammates from 1977 through 1980. Winfield signed with the Yankees as a free agent after the 1980 season, while Fingers was traded twice – first to the St. Louis Cardinals, then to the Brewers – in a five-day span in December 1980. The latter trade also brought the Brewers Simmons and Vuckovich.

20 In the New York Times, Chass quoted Molitor as saying: “I watched [Winfield] play basketball at Minnesota for two years, so I know he can get up there.” Both Molitor and Winfield had starred at the University of Minnesota before turning pro.

21 Tully, “Brewers Defeat Yankees, 5-3”; Associated Press, “Brewers Wake Up in Time to Stay Alive,” Atlantic City Press, October 10, 1981: 25. Simmons was thrown out trying to stretch the double into a triple, missing the third-base bag with his lead foot in a ragged slide that Howard Cosell on the ABC-TV broadcast compared to “a tired porpoise.”

22 In a minor bit of symmetry, Randolph had struck out as the Yankees’ leadoff batter in the first inning against Lerch – though that was a called third strike, not swinging.

23 Brophy, “Brewers Win to Stay Alive.”

24 Lupica, “All Hell Broke Loose to Ruin Yankees’ Coronation Plans.”

25 Going into the 2024 season, the Brewers had reached the playoffs nine times but had never been back to the World Series.