ST. PETERSBURG -- The team from MLB’s smallest market. The team so often good enough to get beat by someone bigger. The team that has cycled through swaps of stars, always refining and refurbishing and refilling their roster with keenly acquired talent. The team that gave a shot to a 60-something skipper with only interim Major League managerial experience and watched him craft a culture of love and laughs.
That’s the team that won the 2026 World Series. And the Brewers team that just delivered the franchise’s first title and Milwaukee its first baseball champion since the 1957 Braves was a true team in every sense.
The Milwaukee Brewers were nobody’s preseason pick and hardly anybody’s October favorite, because it seems there are always squads with more stars ultimately standing in their way.
But not this year. Not for a Brewers team that won Game 5 of the Fall Classic, 4-1, over the Tampa Bay Rays on Wednesday night at Tropicana Field the way it won so many others -- by outlasting their opponent with discipline and deadly precision, finding holes and gaps and weaknesses and exploiting them, again and again.
Behind 5 2/3 scoreless from their young, presumptive Cy Young winner Jacob Misiorowski and their usual slice-and-dice offensive attack, the Brewers went up early and never looked back. They convincingly shook off the 12th-inning Game 4 nightmare that had unfolded in place of their champagne celebration in the day’s early-morning hours and turned that collapse into little more than a minor footnote to their story of autumn glory.
While the Brewers might have fallen just shy of becoming the first MLB team to sweep both a best-of-seven League Championship Series and World Series, their special brand of baseball was still a marvelous thing to behold. Their total team tenacity could not be denied.
Not by a Padres team that was on a heater going into the NLDS.
Not by a Dodgers team coming off consecutive crowns.
And not by a Rays team that had owned the AL.