The Milwaukee Brewers, a small-ball team from the smallest market in the majors, are World Series champions for the first time. They beat the Tampa Bay Rays 4-1 in Game 5 on Wednesday night at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Florida, as thousands of Brewers fans in attendance celebrated.
Young ace Jacob Misiorowski threw 5 2/3 scoreless innings and allowed only two hits before leaving with a right calf cramp. Rookie Cooper Pratt added two hits and two RBIs. Fans in the section behind Milwaukee's dugout, which they had taken over for the last three games, gave Misiorowski a standing ovation. San Marcos native David Hamilton also helped the Brewers' cause with an RBI single in the fifth inning that scored Pratt.
"It's the best feeling ever. All of our fans are here. I know the city's waited a long, long time for this," captain Christian Yelich said. Pratt, 22, who made his major league debut in June, said it felt surreal and joked: "It only took four months!" He set a Series rookie record with six straight hits before a sacrifice fly in the sixth. Jackson Chourio set a five-game Series record with 11 hits.
Pratt gave Milwaukee a 1-0 lead with an RBI single off Rays ace Drew Rasmussen in the second inning. Hamilton's single off Kevin Kelly in the fifth made it 2-0, and World Series MVP William Contreras hit an RBI double in the sixth. Pratt's sacrifice fly made it 4-0. Tampa Bay's Chandler Simpson hit an RBI double with two outs in the ninth, but closer Trevor Megill retired Richie Palacios on a grounder to second to end the game.
Misiorowski, 24, opened with 12 straight four-seam fastballs between 100.9 and 103 mph and threw 58 strikes among his 86 pitches. He had set a World Series velocity record with a 103.5 mph fastball on the first pitch of the Series. He finished with two strikeouts and was 2-0 with a 0.84 ERA in the Series. Milwaukee had bounced back from a 4-3 loss in 12 innings in Game 4, when it was three outs from a sweep.
The title arrives in the 58th season of a franchise that began as the Seattle Pilots in 1969 and moved to Milwaukee a year later. Its only earlier World Series trip, in 1982, ended in a Game 7 loss to the St. Louis Cardinals after a 3-1 series lead. Manager Pat Murphy, 67, survived a heart attack in 2020 and was the NL Manager of the Year in 2024 and 2025. He praised a team whose players cared about each other more than their own stats. "Milwaukee has waited 44 years, and Milwaukee, you have your world championship," principal owner Mark Attanasio said on the field.
The Brewers led the majors with 103 wins and went 11-2 in the postseason, including seven comeback wins and an NLCS sweep of the Dodgers. The teams combined for just four homers in the Series, three of them by Milwaukee. It was the first Series since 1991 between two teams from the bottom half of payrolls. The Rays fell to 0-3 in World Series appearances and were the fifth team to lose Game 5 after dropping the first three games.
The celebration comes with labor tension in the background. Owners are pushing for a salary cap, arguing small-market clubs cannot regularly succeed, and a management lockout is likely to begin Dec. 2, which could threaten the 2027 season.
