The Milwaukee Brewers finished the job on Wednesday night, taking Game 5 from the Tampa Bay Rays 4-1 to lock down the first World Series title in franchise history. The celebration arrived a day later than it might have, thanks to Tampa Bay’s wild 12th-inning rally in Game 4, but there was no delaying it forever.
For a club that spent the season looking very much like baseball’s best team, the championship fits and unsettles at the same time. The Brewers are the smallest Designated Market Area in Major League Baseball, they carried the 19th-highest payroll this year, and they hadn’t reached a World Series in 44 years. At the same time, they finished with the best record in the sport by three games, had four current players who have been MLB All-Stars, and feature Jacob Misiorowski, this year’s likely NL Cy Young winner, along with the game’s top prospect, Jesus Made.
That mix is what made the Brewers such a tricky case all season: a team that looked like a powerhouse, yet still seemed unlikely to end up with the trophy. A bottom-half DMA hadn’t won the World Series since the 2015 Kansas City Royals, and the last champion from the bottom half of payroll was the 2017 Houston Astros. In that light, Milwaukee’s rise was both predictable and improbable.
Game 5 played out like a Brewers win in miniature. Misiorowski set the tone with 5.2 shutout innings, allowing just two hits and one walk while throwing 58 of his 86 pitches for strikes.
He didn’t rack up a big strikeout total - only two - but Tampa Bay never found much of anything against him. A calf cramp cut his night short in the sixth, after trainers came out and he tried to loosen up with a few warm-up pitches.
Milwaukee’s relief corps handled the rest. JoJo Romero and Abner Uribe combined for 1.1 scoreless innings, and Trevor Megill finished the final two innings to seal it.
That kind of depth has been the Brewers’ calling card all year. They entered the playoffs with the second-best ERA in baseball, the best strikeout rate, the fourth-best WHIP and the second-best batting average allowed.
Tampa Bay, though, kept pressing. Liam Hicks ripped a one-out double that caromed off first base and rolled toward the bullpen, and two batters later Chandler Simpson lined a double down the line to bring Hicks home.
Simpson’s hit was his fifth in the last two games as he tried to keep the Rays alive. He went 2-for-4 in the game and finished the postseason hitting .311 in 48 plate appearances.
The Brewers did not win this one with the top of the order carrying them. William Contreras did his part with an RBI double in the sixth, but Milwaukee’s first four hitters combined to go 2-for-15. Jackson Chourio finished 1-for-4 with three strikeouts, while Christian Yelich went 0-for-3 with a hit by pitch.
Tampa Bay starter Drew Rasmussen made that part of the night difficult for Milwaukee. Pitching on three days’ rest after starting Game 2, Rasmussen gave the Rays four innings, allowing one run on two hits while striking out four. He was limited by a pitch count, though, and once he left, Kevin Kelly and Garrett Cleavinger gave up three runs in the next inning.
Milwaukee’s depth showed up again in the middle and bottom of the lineup, with rookie shortstop Cooper Pratt continuing his breakout postseason. The 22-year-old followed his extra-inning home run in Game 4 with a line-drive single to center that scored Brice Turang for the game’s first run. He added another single to left in the fifth and later scored on a base hit from nine-hole hitter David Hamilton.
That hit gave Pratt a World Series record for a rookie with hits in six consecutive at-bats. He finished 2-for-3 with two RBI, and he hit .354 in 51 postseason plate appearances.
Hamilton went 1-for-4 with an RBI and hit .333 in 29 at-bats during the playoffs. The point was clear enough: the Brewers’ lineup was too deep for Tampa Bay to shut down for long.
“This is one of the greatest moments of my life,” smiled Pratt after the game. “It doesn’t even feel real.
This is surreal…The pressure is out of this world. It’s some of the hardest but most fun baseball I’ve ever been a part of.
I messed up a lot of times this postseason, but the guys picked me up. We’re here, and we’re world champions.”
The World Series MVP didn’t go to Pratt, though. That went to William Contreras, who hit .373 across 13 postseason games and went 8-for-21 (.381) with four RBI in the World Series. He became just the second catcher since 2000 to win World Series MVP, joining Salvador Perez, who won it in 2025.
Contreras also joined another small club. Along with Chourio, Antonio Senztela and Angel Zerpa, he became one of only six players to win both a World Baseball Classic and a World Series in the same season after Venezuela’s WBC title earlier this year.
After the final out, Contreras tried to bring reliever Aaron Ashby up to share the MVP trophy with him. Ashby declined, then explained what Contreras means to the team.
“He wants to complete every single day. He wants to die for every single person on this team...He’s our bulldog, and we love this dude.”
And so the 2026 season ends with Milwaukee on top for the first time ever. It’s a championship 57 years in the making, a title for the best team in baseball in the smallest market in baseball, and one that could end up mattering well beyond this October.
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