Opening Day 2013: Milwaukee Brewers Use Extra Innings to Top Colorado Rockies 5-4

Opening Day is one of the most exciting days in baseball, and the Colorado Rockies and Milwaukee Brewers took that to an extreme. We needed an extra inning of baseball in Milwaukee to decide a winner on Opening Day, but ultimately the home team came out on top in thrilling fashion on the first day of baseball.

The Brewers needed to mount a comeback in the eighth inning which they ended up starting back in the third inning but took back the lead late in the game. Ryan Braun and Aramis Ramirez had big time RBI at-bats in the eighth inning to pull the Brewers ahead of the Rockies 4-3, which set up what should have been the first save of the season for John Axford but the Rockies had other plans.

With two outs in the top of the ninth, Axford faced Dexter Fowler who hit the very first pitch he saw out of the park and into the right field bleachers to tie the game at 4-4. Fowlers home run in the ninth inning was the third homer of the game for the Rockies, as Troy Tulowitzski and Carlos Gonzalez homered earlier in the game.

But while Fowler had some late inning heroics for the Rockies to tie the game, it was extra innings heroics by Jonathan Lucroy helped give the Brewers a 5-4 win on a sacrifice fly that scored Ricky Weeks in the bottom of the tenth inning. The win was had by Jim Henderson, who was making his first Opening Day roster appearance of his career at the age of 30, and he was able to shut down the momentum the Rockies were feeling in the away half of the tenth.

Milwaukee missed the playoffs last season a year after making waves in the National League, but they’re off to a great start in 2013 that they’re hoping to build on after a thrilling win on Opening Day.