Milwaukee Brewers capture first World Series title in franchise history

Milwaukee beat the Tampa Bay Rays, 4–1, in Game 5.

Author of the article:

Washington Post

Stephanie Apstein, The Washington Post

Published Oct 29, 2026  •  7 minute read

The Milwaukee Brewers celebrate on the field after defeating the Tampa Bay Rays in the 2026 World Series at Tropicana Field on October 28, 2026 in St Petersburg, Flo. Photo by Elsa /Getty Images

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ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. – Twelve days before the Milwaukee Brewers won the first World Series in franchise history, in the Florida heat, they were cold, and it was dark.

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They were fresh off a sweep of the Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League Championship Series. The United Airlines jet that delivered them home from California had touched down at 6:50 p.m. Central, nearly an hour after sunset. It was 9C, and the wind was whipping.

They had not publicized their arrival time, and yet when they hit the tarmac at Milwaukee’s Mitchell International Airport, they found what seemed to be the entire city waiting for them.

And not just at the terminal. As the buses wound down Howell Avenue and right onto Layton Avenue, the players pressed their noses up against the windows, gazing at the scene.

“These guys don’t quite grasp it yet,” said traveling secretary Dan Larrea, who has been with the organization since 1996. “They’re going to be legends.”

After a 103-win regular season, best in the sport and in franchise history, after that sweep of the hated Dodgers, and after beating the Tampa Bay Rays, 4–1, in Game 5 here on Wednesday night, they already are.

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Twenty-two-year-old Cooper Pratt, who twice in two days gave the Brewers the lead, and who celebrates wins with Fanta; third baseman Jackson Chourio, who may have made more TikToks for the Milwaukee Public Library than he did outs in the World Series; pitcher Brandon Woodruff, who has been in the organization since 2014 and understands perhaps better than anyone else what this means to this place – none of them will ever pay for a Spotted Cow in Beaver Dam or Fond du Lac or Wauwatosa.

When Woodruff was introduced before Game 1, the cheers seemed to shake American Family Field.

“I knew Milwaukee loved me,” he said before Game 4. “But I didn’t know it was that much love. I’ve tried to soak in those moments. Looking around, especially after the first couple of games in Milwaukee, nobody’s leaving the stadium. Nobody wants to go home.”

This is a city that sold out three watch parties – 93,000 tickets total at $15 apiece – for the Florida games in 20 minutes. This is a city that has reportedly bought more postseason merchandise than any other fanbase in baseball history. This is a city that celebrated the team’s only other World Series appearance – when Robin Yount and Paul Molitor and Cecil Cooper lost to the St. Louis Cardinals in seven games in 1982 – with a parade down Wisconsin Avenue.

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The franchise history is meager, but Milwaukeeans love it anyway, and so does the team.

The first thing the Brewers see when they enter the home clubhouse at American Family Field is a museum: the batting helmet from the day in 1993 when Yount hit his franchise-record 251st home run, Carlos Gómez’s 2013 Gold Glove, the scorecard from the day in 2018 that Christian Yelich hit for the cycle. Half a dozen paces takes them to a strip of five lockers, complete with game-used paraphernalia, one for each Hall of Famer: broadcaster Bob Uecker, Hank Aaron, Rollie Fingers, Molitor and Yount.

When the Brewers beat the San Diego Padres to win the National League Division Series, they popped champagne bottles whose labels sported the names of each of the 190 cities in Wisconsin. (Right fielder Sal Frelick sprayed West Allis, causing his teammates to begin referring to him as “Stallis Sal.”)

A week later, they celebrated the NLCS win with bottles labeled for each of the 178 Brewers who ever took the field in the postseason. (Fortunately, the organization has made 12 playoff appearances, including eight in the past nine years, to give Larrea, who coordinated the gesture, plenty of options. “In 2008, there would have been about a case of champagne, and that’s about it,” he said with a laugh.)

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First baseman Jake Bauers gushed about “the buy-in from top to bottom on what we’re trying to do, which is ultimately win a World Series,” he said. “And I don’t just mean the players, I mean the coaching staff, the scouts, down to the ushers working the aisles at the stadium. I think the entire city wants a World Series. The organization knows that, and everybody within the organization is working towards a common goal.”

For many of them, that goal crystallized 53 weeks ago, as they perched on the dugout rail and watched the aftermath of yet another season-ending loss. Before running into the Dodgers, they had beaten the Chicago Cubs in five games in the NLDS, and “we kind of celebrated like that was something,” Bauers recalled this week.

Then their season was over. The Dodgers had eviscerated them in four games in the NLCS. Two-way star Shohei Ohtani had delivered the greatest game ever played. L.A. was headed toward its second consecutive title.

“And you would have thought it was a handshake line in spring training,” Bauers said of the Dodgers’ celebration. “That’s something that I carried with me. That’s something that I remembered. It was a little bit of motivation to just say, ‘We’ve got to keep going until there’s not another game left to play.'”

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On Wednesday, finally, they could stop and look around. When they did, when they peered into the stands at Tropicana Field, they saw thousands of Wisconsinites who had piled onto jets from Mitchell International Airport, or from O’Hare or Midway, to be there for something no one in Brewers blue had ever seen before.

The hand-wringing over whether baseball’s current economic structure precludes other small-market teams from doing what Milwaukee just did elides that no other team is doing quite what Milwaukee is doing.

The Brewers’ roster features one player who was signed as a free agent, backup catcher Gary Sánchez. They select amateurs well. They trade well. They develop well.

Chourio was a $1.9 million player as a 16-year-old, and Frelick and second baseman Brice Turang were first-round picks. Ace Jacob Misiorowski threw 100 mph in college. But Milwaukee also plucked catcher William Contreras, who was regarded as primarily a designated hitter, from Atlanta and turned him into an average defender with the most successful ball-strike challenges in the sport and a .380 batting average in the Series. The Brewers found reliever Aaron Ashby, who once walked nine straight hitters in college, and rebuilt him after shoulder surgery into a fireman who just broke a 45-year-old record for scoreless postseason innings.

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And they hang onto the right players. They signed both Chourio and Pratt to eight-year, eight-figure extensions before either had ever played a major league game.

The Brewers have been a model franchise for nearly a decade now, and for a while this all seemed to be the doing of president of baseball operations David Stearns and manager Craig Counsell, who were both considered to be among the best in the business. But Counsell left for the Cubs after the 2023 season, and Stearns went to the New York Mets a year later. In both cases, their deputies took over: bench coach Pat Murphy and General Manager Matt Arnold. And the Brewers have only improved.

“When I first got here,” owner Mark Attanasio recalled this week, “I said the two things I didn’t want to hear was ‘We’re too small’ or ‘We can’t do this.'” He added, “I actually kept trying to say we were a mid-market team even though clearly we weren’t.”

This season, in the league’s smallest media market, the Brewers ranked No. 19 in payroll, and according to MLB data, their spending on baseball operations ranked No. 11. “Most wins in baseball over the last two years,” Attanasio said. “I think we’re doing a pretty damn good job.”

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The signs around American Family Field concourses read WIN OUR WAY. But there is another one that only the players and staffers see, a reference to something Goo Goo Dolls lead singer Johnny Rzeznik told Yelich, Turang and equipment manager Jason Shawger this summer when they met him at a concert: THIS MAY BE THE LAST TIME YOU GET TO DO THIS.

The Brewers know how special this team is, and that it would be a disservice to one another to take it for granted. So they try never to take a pitch off, because they never know if they will get another chance. “Win tonight,” Murphy tells them constantly. That’s on a sign, too.

“It’s a great reflection of our identity,” Woodruff said. “And it’s what’s gotten us here.”

A parade awaits. But first, the Brewers will return home on Thursday afternoon. They will fly into Mitchell. From there, instead of taking I-94 or I-794 back to American Family Field, Larrea plans to reroute the buses. They will drive down Wisconsin Avenue. He wants the Brewers to see Milwaukee, and he wants the city to see the legends.

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