The 2026 World Series opens Friday, and the matchup features the two clubs that earned it most. Milwaukee finished with the best record in baseball at 103-59, while Tampa Bay piled up 98 wins and spent most of the year looking like the American League’s top team.
What separates the Brewers and Rays from everyone else isn’t just one dominant trait. They win in a handful of different ways: small ball, elite pitching, sharp bullpen use, and stars delivering when the pressure spikes.
For the Cubs, that makes the comparison unavoidable.
Milwaukee handled Chicago in the regular season, taking nine of 13 meetings and running away with the NL Central by 14 games. The Cubs did spend 19 days atop the division in May, but that lead disappeared before the schedule even reached its midpoint. Against Tampa Bay, Chicago took two of three in early April on the road, then later watched its own postseason end in a Wild Card sweep while the Rays kept rolling to the pennant.
The biggest separator between the Cubs and the teams playing for the title was steadiness. Milwaukee’s longest winning streak was five games, and its longest skid was six.
Tampa Bay’s worst stretch was a five-game losing streak. Chicago’s season, by contrast, swung wildly from two different 10-game winning streaks to a 10-game losing streak.
Base stealing was another clear edge for the two World Series clubs. Tampa Bay swiped 164 bags during the regular season, just ahead of Milwaukee’s 162.
In October, the Rays lead the field with 11 stolen bases and the Brewers have 10. No other playoff team had more than six.
Chicago finished with 114 steals, with Pete Crow-Armstrong responsible for 41 of them. Nico Hoerner was next on the list with 23.
Both Milwaukee and Tampa Bay also get on base and put the ball in play in ways that keep innings alive. The Brewers led the league with a 10.6% walk rate and a .316 batting average on balls in play. The Rays, meanwhile, posted an MLB-best 8.8% strikeout rate and finished with a .296 BABIP, good for the top third of the league.
There’s a roster-building lesson in there too. MLB.com’s Jim Callis laid out how both teams constructed their pennant-winning rosters, and the paths were strikingly similar.
On Milwaukee’s projected World Series roster, only one player - backup catcher Gary Sanchez - arrived as a free agent. The Brewers got 15 players through trades, seven from the draft, and three via international signings.
Tampa Bay’s roster makeup looks similar. Sixteen players came through trades, five were free agents, three were homegrown, and one each came from the Rule 5 draft and the international pool. Among the free-agent additions, only starting pitcher Nick Martinez, who signed a one-year, $13 million deal in the offseason, has been a major contributor.
That international piece matters, especially for the Cubs. It has been an area of weakness for Chicago, while both of these clubs have mined it well.
Milwaukee signed Jackson Chourio for $1.8 million when he was 16 years old in 2021, after tracking him since he was 14. The Brewers also landed closer Abner Uribe for $85,000 in 2018. Tampa Bay found Jonathan Aranda in Mexico for $130,000 in 2015.
Pitching is the other foundation, and it’s where the Cubs fell short in 2026.
Both the Brewers and Rays built staffs good enough to finish in the top 10 in MLB during the regular season. Milwaukee has likely NL Cy Young winner Jacob Misiorowski, whom the team drafted and developed into an ace. Tampa Bay’s top arm is Drew Rasmussen, a 2018 Brewers draftee who arrived in a 2021 trade and has become one of the game’s most dependable pitchers.
Those are exactly the areas Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer said he plans to improve in his end-of-season press conference. Chicago already made one move in that direction by hiring Steve Miller away from the Rays as its new international scouting director. If you can beat them, join them too - isn’t that how the saying goes?
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