The Milwaukee Brewers were dismissed for most of October as too young, too unheralded and too cheap to win it all — underdogs even after posting the most regular-season wins in baseball for a second straight year. On Wednesday night at Tropicana Field, they finished the job anyway, beating the Tampa Bay Rays 4-1 in Game 5 to capture the first World Series title in the franchise's 57-year history.
Tens of thousands of Brewers fans made the 1,300-mile trip from Milwaukee to watch it happen, filling the lower bowl in navy blue and yellow. "You say they've been waiting so long, that's one thing — but it's more about their undying commitment to this team," Brewers manager Pat Murphy said afterward. "It started growing and growing throughout the year, grew last year, and then you see what it means to them. It's not just the city of Milwaukee. It's the whole state of Wisconsin."
A Budget Team That Wouldn't Fold
Milwaukee carried baseball's 19th-highest payroll into the postseason and ranked 28th in home runs — hardly the profile of a club built for October. Instead it went 11-2 through the playoffs, surviving a tense NL Division Series against San Diego, overwhelming the two-time defending champion Los Angeles Dodgers in the NLCS, and racing past a similarly unheralded Rays team in the final round.
Wednesday's clincher was set up by starter Jacob Misiorowski, who suffocated Rays hitters through five scoreless innings before a calf cramp forced him out with two outs in the sixth — the first time all postseason he had pitched beyond the fifth inning. Rookie shortstop Cooper Pratt, who hit what could have been the series-winning homer in the 12th inning of Game 4, drove in Milwaukee's first run with a second-inning single and added another hit in the fifth, extending a streak that made him the first player since David Ortiz in 2013 to record a hit in six straight World Series at-bats. The bullpen trio of JoJo Romero, Abner Uribe and Trevor Megill shut the door from there, with Megill freezing Richie Palacios on a 99.1 mph fastball for the final out.
Records Fell All October
Catcher William Contreras capped a dominant postseason by winning World Series MVP, posting an .863 OPS, throwing out four would-be base stealers and going 10-for-13 in replay-review challenges after being one of the league's worst at it during the regular season. "I don't want to offend any of the other catchers in the league; the last thing I want to do is offend any of them," Contreras said. "But sitting up here today, champion of the world, I feel like I'm the best catcher in the league."
He wasn't the only one making history. Reliever Aaron Ashby threw 18 consecutive scoreless innings, breaking the postseason record for a reliever, while outfielder Jackson Chourio tied a Babe Ruth mark with 10 hits in the series' first four games. Milwaukee's front office, led by Matt Arnold, had long been criticized for trading away homegrown stars like Josh Hader and Willy Adames as they approached free agency rather than spending to keep them — a strategy the team's longtime core, including captain Christian Yelich and infielder Brice Turang, said finally proved out.
"A lot of heart, man," Arnold said. "Everything that we do in this era is something that we measure, but you can't measure the heart of this team." Having reached the playoffs seven times in the past eight years without winning it all, the Brewers now have the trophy that had eluded the franchise since its only previous World Series appearance, in 1982.
