Brewers Rumble Dodgers 24-9 for Complete Series Victory!

GLENDALE, Ariz. – It was a full-fledged, unabashed cacophony of Cactus cuckooness. The kind of game where you just pray someone’s mom calls “Dinnertime!

” and mercifully ends the whole thing. The kind of game that's such a football score on the scoreboard that the manager started scheming up a run-pass option offense in the eighth inning. The kind of game that perfectly sums up spring training in mid-March in the valley of the sun.

"Only in the Cactus League," Pat Murphy said after the Milwaukee Brewers' 24-9 victory over the Los Angeles Dodgers on May 16 at Camelback Ranch-Glendale. In all there would be 466 pitches thrown, 207 of them balls. Of those 466, 250 were from Dodgers hurlers; only once in the pitch tracking era since 2008 has a team thrown more pitches in a single nine-inning game than that.

That game on July 16, 2021, saw the Washington Nationals chuck 258 mostly hapless-pellets toward the plate in, coincidentally, a 24-8 loss. By the time the Dodgers were walking in a carousel of runs late, Murphy was talking off the ear of coaches Jace Peterson and Daniel Vogelbach about his machinations of an RPO offense. Peterson, a former cornerback at McNeese State, would be a viable quarterback or running back in Murphy's scheme; it doesn't take a rocket scientist to determine what position Vogelbach would play.