DENVER _ The first transitional season for the rebuilding Milwaukee Brewers came to an end Sunday with a result that didn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.
But, in a season in which they won more games than most folks expected, nobody in the visiting clubhouse at Coors Field complained about adding one more, even if it took extra innings.
The Brewers beat the Colorado Rockies, 6-4, in 10 innings to end the year with consecutive extra-inning victories and a 73-89 record.
Catcher Andrew Susac delivered the decisive blow with a two-run, two-out home run in the 10th off Rockies reliever Chris Rusin. It was the first home run with the Brewers for Susac, a September call-up acquired from San Francisco in the Will Smith trade.
The Brewers were in position to win, 4-3, but Tyler Thornburg blew a save for the second day in a row and the third time of the final week. Thornburg allowed a two-out, run-scoring single by Jordan Patterson in the bottom of the ninth and the teams went to extra innings on the final day.
The Brewers were trailing, 3-2, in the eighth when Domingo Santana blasted a two-run homer to left off reliever Carlos Estevez. Chris Carter was aboard with a leadoff single when Santana crushed one to left.
Carter did not hit a home run, however, and neither did Colorado's Nolan Arenado, leaving them tied for the National League home run title with 41 each. Last season, Arenado tied for the homer crown with Washington's Bryce Harper with 42 apiece.
With all of his starting pitchers shut down for various reasons, manager Craig Counsell went with a "bullpen" day to cover the game. Reliever Tyler Cravy, who pitched a couple of innings out of the pen Friday night, started and covered two more.
As might be expected in a game with little at stake, the hitters went up there hacking. The inevitable happened in the fifth inning when Santana struck out, giving the Brewers a major-league record of 1,536 whiffs in a single season.
Expectations were quite low for the Brewers, who won only 68 games in 2015 after a horrid start led to the firing of manager Ron Roenicke and the decision to embark on an organizational reboot. There were predictions that they would lose 100 games but instead finished with a better record than last year.
Counsell cautioned about getting too excited about that result, however.
"We won 70-some games; that's not enough," Counsell said. "What we set out to do was to explore some young players, to develop some young players, to compete every day. Those things happened, but it's hard to be satisfied completely when you're not winning enough games. That's how I look at it."
As might be expected from a transitional team in which many players were seeing extensive action in the majors for the first time, it was a somewhat bizarre year offensively for the Brewers. They set a major-league record for strikeouts but also ranked third with 599 walks, an increase of 187 from 2015.
There was a preseason emphasis on working the pitch counts more and the Brewers did so, resulting in many strikeouts and many walks. The approach did not result in more runs scored, however. They finished with 671, ranking 26th in the majors.
"You're always going to (try to) figure out a way, 'How do we score more runs?' " Counsell said. "That's the bottom line. We re-made how we're trying to score runs significantly this year. That was the big difference.
"We're going to end up walking 180 more times than we did last year, and I know our strikeouts have been a source of talk. Our strikeouts are going up by 200. I'll take that trade-off any day. Walks go up by almost the same as strikeouts, and the number is 200? That's a good trade-off. That's been a success.
"You can't fix everything in one day but the mind-set that we've created, the getting on base mind-set, that's important. We have to continue that. If some strikeouts went with that, I'm good with that. I'm really good with that."
One of the things that hurt the Brewers was a lack of clutch hitting, also not surprising with so many inexperienced players. They batted a mere .238 with runners in scoring position, the fifth-worst mark in the majors.
"We didn't do well at that this year," Counsell said. "If you look at a guy like Chris Carter (.169 hitter with RISP), he's had a really good year (overall) this year, and in the past he's been better with runners in scoring position. How do you explain that?
"It ebbs and flows a little bit. Strikeouts will hurt teams with runners in scoring position. Not all strikeouts are created equal. The strikeout with men on third is going to hurt you, there's no question. When you're a team prone to strikeouts, that's going to happen more than it does for another team, and that's when it hurts you."
