ST. PETERSBURG -- In their 57th season in Milwaukee, the Brewers won the city’s first World Series title since 1957. In the 44th year since they last appeared in a World Series, they won for Henry Aaron, whose No. 44 hangs, retired, atop American Family Field. And they didn’t just win the World Series, they hoisted the Commissioner’s Trophy on Wednesday like they owned it, winning the 11 postseason games required while losing just twice along the way.
At long last, it’s no longer just about the 1957 Braves and 1982 Brewers. Jacob Misiorowski, Jackson Chourio, Christian Yelich, William Contreras, Cooper Pratt, Aaron Ashby and the rest of the 2026 Milwaukee Brewers will be just as beloved, forever.
At long last, after their 4-1 win over the Rays in Game 5, they are World Series champions.
“I can’t tell you how many people have told me, ‘I’ve waited my whole life for this,’” said the Captain, Yelich. “I think any time you win a World Series, it changes a place a little bit.”
It changed at 11:13 p.m. local time and 10:13 p.m. back in Milwaukee, where 31,000 fans filled the Brewers’ domed home to watch a game on the scoreboard that was played 1,200 miles away. Thousands more Milwaukee fans turned Tropicana Field into the Brewers’ home away from home all week, and watched live as the thing that they, their parents and their grandparents dreamed to see happen, actually happened.
Before Wednesday night, five current franchises had never won the World Series: the Brewers, Mariners, Padres, Rays and Rockies. Now there are four.
“I'm just really, really grateful, really thankful that we did it. Like who believed it?” said the Brewers’ Springsteen-loving, 67-year-old manager, Pat Murphy. “There's so many things that led up to it now that I look back and see the years of getting eliminated or being beaten last year by the Dodgers. That was a blessing, because we learned from it and we grew, and we came in with a different attitude. We came in with a spirit about us, and we weren't going to be denied.”
He didn’t take the responsibility of ending Milwaukee’s championship drought lightly. Neither did Yelich, the 34-year-old who arrived in Milwaukee in 2018 and helped build the culture that has produced eight postseason berths in the past nine years -- eight chances to catch fire at the right time and go all the way. This team took nothing lightly.
After winning a franchise-record and Major League-best 103 games in the regular season, they beat the Padres, baseball’s hottest second-half team, in the NLDS. Then they swept the Dodgers, who’d sent the Brewers home in the postseason three times in the previous eight years, in the NLCS. Then they drowned the Rays with suffocating pitching and relentless at-bats, brushing off a grueling, heartbreaking Game 4 loss when the Brewers were just three outs away from the promised land, to finish the job a day later.
Misiorowski delivered his finest start of this postseason with 5 2/3 scoreless innings until calf cramping cut it short in the sixth. Pratt, the rookie shortstop, tied and broke a rookie record for the World Series with hits in his fifth and sixth consecutive plate appearances, then added a sacrifice fly in the sixth as the lead grew to 4-0 and the Rays dipped deeper into their bullpen. The Brewers’ bullpen, meanwhile, held firm aside from a lone run in the ninth after Liam Hicks’ double hit first base and took a crazy carom.
Maybe in another Brewers season, that would have opened the door to disaster. In this Brewers season, closer Trevor Megill stayed calm, limited the damage to a lone run, got a game-ending groundout to second baseman Brice Turang and had the privilege of being the image of the pitcher throwing his fists in the air after the championship-clinching out.
“Obviously, I don’t want to go out that way, but I left it all out there on the field,” said Misiorowski. “But these guys are amazing. We’re just a group of friends playing sports.”
“It’s better than you think it would be,” Yelich said. “I blacked out on the field as soon as I saw ’Rang throw it over to first base. I don’t remember what happened. I think I ran to Megill first. What a feeling.”
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All along the way, the Brewers’ longtime clubhouse manager Tony Migliaccio carried a coin in his pocket from Judy Uecker, the wife of the late Brewers broadcaster, who knew how much Bob Uecker enjoyed receiving challenge coins from military veterans and first responders. After he passed away in January 2025 from small cell lung cancer, Judy had coins made with Bob’s face on one side and his final signoff on the Brewers Radio Network on the other.
So long, everybody!
Migliaccio, who started as a batboy in 1978, has carried it ever since.
“I keep it in my pocket throughout the year,” he said. “I like to think he’s with us.”
That’s “us” in the broadest possible sense, because Uecker meant the world not just to the Brewers or to the city of Milwaukee, but to the whole state of Wisconsin.
Murphy has been with the Brewers since 2016, and has managed the club the past three seasons. But he didn’t fully appreciate the team’s reach until last winter.
“Last offseason, I went on a five-city tour, stopping at different cities, staying over in Eau Claire, LaCrosse, the Dells, Green Bay, Wausau. We spoke at these theaters and met the fans, and I sat up there and did whatever this is called,” Murphy said. “You just realize like, oh my God, 1,200 people show up. They love the Brewers. We had a riot with it. It was really, really fun.
“I FaceTimed Sal [Frelick] almost every time, and I'd catch him off guard. He'd be somewhere, coming out of the shower or something, and it would be great. He'd have a towel around him. ‘Where are you at? Hey, a couple people want to say hi to you,’ and I'd turn [the phone] around.”
Everybody would laugh. Murphy, the two-time defending NL Manager of the Year Award winner with a chance to win a third next month, has a knack for that.
“What's going on with the group, that makes you smile inside knowing that so many people care and they hang on this,” Murphy said. “That's the whole thing about the state of Wisconsin and the city of Milwaukee. It's like, these people really identify. It's something. They're hard-working people, a lot of them, and this is what they do in life. They do their job, and then they follow their sports teams.”
They followed the Brewers all the way to St. Petersburg, turning Tropicana Field into a home-field advantage on the road for a trio of World Series games. Players knew that the sky-high demand for Games 1 and 2 in Milwaukee meant many fans planned to travel. But they never could have expected how many.
“I’ll remember that forever, man,” Yelich said. “I was looking up, taking that all in. I’m seeing a stadium with all Brewers fans, and we’re sitting on a stage that says World Series champions. It felt like a movie.”
When the 1982 Brewers lost Game 7 of the World Series, Milwaukee threw them a parade anyway. Well, it’s time to do that again, and for real. The championship parade is Friday at 10 a.m. CT, beginning at the intersection of N. 4th St. and W. Wisconsin Ave. and proceeding through downtown Milwaukee to the Summerfest grounds.
“What this means to the city is incredible,” said Brandon Woodruff, the longest-tenured Brewer of all, who decided against season-ending shoulder surgery in August so he would try to make it back to pitch in the World Series.
He did. He threw the ninth inning of the Brewers’ blowout win in Game 3. Now he gets to ride in a parade.
“I gave Murph a big hug and I was crying,” Woodruff said. “I said, ‘Thank you for giving me the opportunity to do that.’ To finally get over the hump and do it like we did it, it’s unbelievable.”
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Maybe we should have seen this coming. There were so many clues along the way in October that this might be the Brewers’ year.
That towering fly ball in Game 1 of the NLDS that caromed off the roof at American Family Field and fell into Chourio’s glove. An impossible comeback against the best closer in baseball in Game 2 of that series, and Garrett Mitchell’s lead-saving catch at the center-field wall in the clinching Game 4 with Padres fans clawing at his back. Jake Bauers’ epic, 11-pitch home run in NLCS Game 3, two days after his epic, 12-pitch walk turned the tide in Milwaukee’s favor in Game 2.
In the World Series, there was a game-ending double play in Game 1 that was called off, and the Brewers won anyway, stranding the tying runner at third base. Comebacks from four-run deficits in NLCS Game 4 and World Series Game 2. And Yelich, the Captain, hustling to second base on a two-out grounder and beating the throw by a hair, extending what became a record-setting, eight-run, game-breaking, series-breaking inning in Game 3.
If any one of those moments goes the other way, maybe it’s a different story.
But the Brewers wrote the story themselves.
They are World Series champions.