The Milwaukee Brewers are World Series champions for the first time. They beat the Tampa Bay Rays 4-1 at Tropicana Field on Wednesday, October 28, 2026, closing the series 4-1 and ending a wait that began when the franchise was founded in 1969.
The final out came at 11:13 p.m. local time: a groundout to second baseman Brice Turang, fielded and thrown to first while closer Trevor Megill watched from the mound.
"I blacked out on the field as soon as I saw 'Rang throw it over to first base," outfielder Christian Yelich said.
Two droughts closed at once
The number that matters most to Milwaukee is not 57 years of Brewers baseball. It is 69. The city's last baseball championship belonged to the Braves, in 1957, before that franchise left for Atlanta. The Brewers had reached the World Series exactly once before, in 1982, and lost it.
This was also a short series for a team that spent October barely losing. Milwaukee won eleven postseason games and lost two, and one of those two was Game 4 — the 12th-inning rally that let Tampa Bay force a fifth game and delayed the celebration by a day.
Misiorowski, then the bullpen
Starter Jacob Misiorowski carried the clinching game. He gave up nothing through 5 2/3 innings before calf cramping took him out in the sixth, and the bullpen finished what he left.
"But these guys are amazing," Misiorowski said. "We're just a group of friends playing sports."
Rookie shortstop Cooper Pratt did the damage at the plate. He tied and then broke the World Series record for a rookie by reaching base with hits in his fifth and sixth consecutive plate appearances, and his sacrifice fly in the sixth made it 4-0. Tampa Bay's only run came in the ninth, on a double by Liam Hicks that took a bad bounce.
Manager Pat Murphy put the series down to temperament. "We came in with a spirit about us, and we weren't going to be denied," he said.
Watching from 1,200 miles away
Because the clincher was played in Florida, the largest crowd of Brewers fans was in Wisconsin. About 31,000 people filled American Family Field in Milwaukee to watch the game on the ballpark's scoreboard, with others making the trip to St. Petersburg.
Reporting from MLB.com and NBC Sports.
