The Cubs hitter that the Brewers must be careful with in the NLDS

Rivalry series don’t wait around for stars to find their timing. The Milwaukee Brewers earned home-field advantage and now have a date with the Chicago Cubs, a club that edged Milwaukee 7–6 in the regular-season set and knows every contour of American Family Field. That’s the chessboard: tight margins, loud crowds, and a best-of-five series where one swing can erase six innings of good process. Milwaukee’s run prevention and pesky offensive approach have carried them all year, but October is a different animal, and matchups become the whole story.

Which is why the most dangerous Cub in this matchup might not be the obvious name. Forget the marquee for a second. Michael Busch arrives at this series white-hot, the kind of locked-in player who turns good teams into postseason problems. Dating back to the final week of the regular season, Busch went 8-for-14 with four homers and eight RBI, then punctuated the Wild Card with a dagger swing against San Diego. Players like that flip series on their heads: they don’t need volume to change outcomes, just a single mistake in a high-leverage at-bat.

Cubs’ Michael Busch is the matchup that should worry Milwaukee

Zoom out and the season line backs up the moment. Busch quietly posted a .261/.343/.523 slash with 34 homers and 90 RBI, doing star-level damage without the star-level spotlight that follows names like Kyle Tucker, Pete Crow-Armstrong, or Seiya Suzuki. The profile is built for October: mature zone control, real pull-side lift, and enough opposite-field carry to punish pitchers who try to “safe-miss” away. He doesn’t chase the big inning; he creates it.

So what’s the Brewers’ counter? Limit the looks he wants and shrink his damage window. That starts with variety. Leverage planning is the other half. The Cubs tend to stack traffic in the middle third; Milwaukee cannot let Busch bat with the inning already tilted. That means attacking the hitters in front of him, stealing first-pitch strikes, and keeping free passes off the table.

Defensively, take the singles and take away the gap. Align to his pull tendencies with two strikes, keep the outfield ready for hard liners, and make Chicago stack hits rather than ambush for extra bases at a time. Milwaukee doesn’t need to erase Busch; they need to keep him in the yard and on first base. Every contained at-bat nudges the math toward the Brewers’ bullpen blueprint in the later half of these games.

If Milwaukee keeps Michael Busch from writing the swing of the series, their home-field edge grows with every inning. Let him stay on the heater, and the Cubs suddenly have a middle-order hammer who turns fine margins into deficits.