Ashby leaned on his sinker for six outs with little swing and miss

Kyle Tucker took two low sinkers to start the seventh, fouled off two more and worked Aaron Ashby to a full count. Ashby stayed with the sinker for a sixth straight pitch. Tucker missed it at 99.7 mph, giving Ashby the first of the six outs he recorded.

Ashby protected Milwaukee’s 2–1 lead through the seventh and eighth innings of NLCS Game 1 against the Dodgers at American Family Field on October 11. He allowed no hits, walked Will Smith and struck out Tucker on 26 pitches. Only two swings missed across the full outing.

The principal change was selection. Ashby threw sinkers much more often than in his season relief sample, and their recorded average speed increased. The result nevertheless depended largely on balls put into play, including two high popups, rather than a succession of strikeouts.

Nineteen sinkers in a broader season repertoire

Ashby’s baseline contains 1,538 physical pitches in 74 regular-season Milwaukee relief appearances, from March 26 through September 26. Sinkers made up 52.0% of that sample. In Game 1 they accounted for 19 of 26 pitches, or 73.1%, an increase of 21.1 percentage points.

Those sinkers averaged 98.7 mph, compared with 97.7 in the baseline. He also threw four changeups, two curveballs and one slider. The curveball share fell from 22.4% to 7.7%, and the slider from 11.8% to 3.8%. The complete chart keeps his uncommon regular-season four-seamers visible even though none appeared in this outing.

Tucker’s confrontation shows that a single pitch type can still produce different responses. The first two sinkers finished well below the recorded zone. Fouls then supplied two strikes, another low pitch brought the count full, and the final sinker crossed near the lower boundary. The sequence locates the pitches without claiming what Ashby intended or Tucker expected.

Los Angeles missed two of 12 attempts, or 16.7%, compared with 32.2% during Ashby’s season relief work. He collected only one called strike. Those figures limit any description of overpowering execution, even though his sinker was faster and no hitter reached on a hit.

Contact supplied five of the six outs

Enrique Hernández hit a changeup at 97.7 mph for a seventh-inning flyout, the only hard-hit contact among five measured balls put into play. Mookie Betts also flew out. In the eighth, Freddie Freeman and Shohei Ohtani hit sinkers for popups with exit speeds of 71.3 and 71.0 mph and launch angles of 73 and 67 degrees.

Those two popups explain part of the favorable contact result more specifically than the 79.2 mph overall average. Teoscar Hernández completed the eighth with a 67.6 mph groundout on a changeup. All five contacts became outs, but their different trajectories and speeds should not be collapsed into a claim that every ball was weakly hit.

Smith’s four-pitch walk was the remaining baserunner. Ashby then retired Ohtani and Hernández, resolving his own runner before departure. He used 15 pitches in the seventh and 11 in the eighth, recording three outs in each; the workload panel keeps the innings separate.

His outing supports a contact-based account of useful relief. More frequent, faster sinkers coincided with two high popups and a clean two-inning result, while the small missed-swing total qualified the apparent dominance of the box score. A future outing can test whether the larger sinker share persists and whether the contact continues to turn into manageable outs.