ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — The Milwaukee Brewers were the best team in Major League Baseball all season. They were far and away the best for the first three weeks of October, the sport’s most crucial month. And they were the best during the 123rd World Series, beating the Tampa Bay Rays in five games.
After staking their claim at the top of the sport all season long, it culminates here: For the first time ever, the Milwaukee Brewers are champions of the baseball world, and they deserve it.
There is simply no facet of baseball and of winning games at which the Brewers do not excel. Only one team scored more runs. They ranked fifth in steals, first in walk rate. They led the majors in batting average and on-base percentage. They did not rely on homers but could go deep when needed and ranked seventh in average exit velocity. In run prevention, the Brewers ranked second in team ERA and second in strikeout rate. The team defense was in the top five to 10 in most leading metrics.
Milwaukee had its moments before — a lone pennant in 1982, led by Hall of Famers Robin Yount and Paul Molitor. National League Championship Series appearances in 2011, 2018 and 2025. But the Brewers had never been able to break the ceiling and win a World Series title. This year, they left no doubt. They took down the San Diego Padres in four games and the defending champion Los Angeles Dodgers in a sweep. Those same Dodgers had eliminated the Brewers in their previous two NLCS appearances, the greatest recent obstacle between Milwaukee and that long-sought championship.
“If you’re expecting to go to the World Series on the NL side, you’re going to have to go through these guys until somebody proves different,” Christian Yelich said before this year’s NLCS. “That’s the standard they’ve set the last few years.”
Now the Brewers are the standard, for reasons both tangible and intangible. Milwaukee didn’t survive the playoff road as much as it repaved it. The Brewers won a franchise record 103 games during the season, then followed that up with a dominant 11-2 postseason. Going back to September, the Brewers closed out their season on a 26-5 heater.
That’s the way to land a title 58 years in the making. The Brewers did not pry open the championship door. To paraphrase legendary football coach Bum Phillips, they kicked the damn thing in.
IF THE PREVIOUS successful runs in Brewers history ran up against a competitive ceiling, we can now see how it all led up to this. Through a process of constant iteration, not just of rosters but of organizational processes, making one smart decision at a time and never overlooking the soft factors that go with winning, the franchise has finally reached the top of the sport.
Since owner Mark Attanasio purchased the team in 2005, the Brewers have grown into one of the most consistently successful franchises in MLB. They’ve done this by remaining disciplined in their payroll expenditures — perhaps a natural outgrowth of playing in the sport’s smallest market by population and media size — but cutting few corners when it comes to enabling innovation from its baseball leadership.
“I used to use the words ‘punch above our weight,’ and the payroll reflects that,” Attanasio said. “I think we still have among the smallest media revenues, including this year, but we’re able to get to a No. 19 or No. 20 out of 30 teams in payroll because of the support that we get. We put all of our resources back into the team.”
It wasn’t that long ago that the Brewers seemed to have an ideal brain trust in former president of baseball operations David Stearns — now running baseball operations for the Mets — and highly regarded manager Craig Counsell, a Milwaukee-area native now managing the large-market Cubs, Milwaukee’s chief rival. The Brewers achieved a lot of success with those two at the helm, always balancing potential exits of key players for the riches of larger markets.
But their departures only led Milwaukee to level up.
“If you study businesses and organizations, you want to have good succession planning,” Attanasio said. “Before you even get to Matt [Arnold] and Pat Murphy, you had David Stearns and Craig Counsell. What we’ve done in baseball ops the last five years is extraordinary.”
Under Arnold — MLB’s Executive of the Year two years running — the Brewers continued their innovative ways by always being out in front of trends and changes in the game. Every team is on a constant search for market inefficiencies, but the Brewers, like the Rays, the team they just vanquished in the World Series, truly leave no stone unturned. It’s not domestic scouting, international scouting, player development, analytics, game planning, clubhouse culture, medical science or mental health initiatives. It’s all things.
The Brewers have drafted well, bringing in elite talents such as Brice Turang, Garrett Mitchell and Jacob Misiorowski from the domestic talent supply. They’ve hit big in the international market, signing Jackson Chourio at a young age, adding Luis Lara, Abner Uribe and others. After identifying those players, the Brewers developed them as well as any organization and then delighted at what these talents accomplished in the majors.
“I really care about them,” Arnold said. “You get to know them, you get to know their families, you get to know their history. You see them when they’re so young. And for them to be able to take these steps in their careers to blossom as superstars, like we’re seeing with guys like Misiorowski, from Chourio and Aaron Ashby, Logan [Henderson] from a small juco in Texas … you know, it’s really cool.”
The Brewers are not just baseball’s best team, they have a young foundation. Turang is a young veteran. Cooper Pratt took over at shortstop during the season as a rookie and remained a fixture through the title run. Pratt, Chourio and Lara signed early extensions to keep them around beyond their six-year service time window. Misiorowski, Henderson and October phenom Robert Gasser have the makings of the kind of rotation big three that Woodruff, Corbin Burnes and Freddy Peralta were not so long ago.
In other words, this team is built to last. That has always been the play, small market or not.
“We invest a lot of minutes in acquisition and development,” Arnold said. “We’ve got to make sure that pipeline is very strong. That’s our foundation. Making sure this is sustainable is a core to one of Mark’s tenets that he talked about when he first bought the team many years ago.”
AFTER MOLITOR AND Yount led the Brewers to the 1982 World Series, the club did not return to the postseason for 26 years. The team that broke the drought was the Prince Fielder-Ryan Braun era group that made the playoffs in 2008 and advanced to the NLCS in 2011, losing in six to the Cardinals.
In the coming years, three crucial figures made their ways to Milwaukee. In 2016, Murphy joined the Brewers as a bench coach, when they finished 30½ games out of first place in 2016. Pitcher Brandon Woodruff, drafted by Milwaukee in 2011, arrived in the majors in 2017, and Yelich, who came to the club via a trade with the Marlins, joined the next year.
Together, they helped the Brewers find their identity on and off the field. Contact hitting became the emphasis over all power, all the time. Athleticism on the bases and in the field took precedence over a position group that once featured the “jumbo infield.”
They also helped develop an all-for-one mantra and a collective insistence on focusing on the task at hand. To an almost maddening extent, no one would admit that anything exists other than the next game, a practice that continued even after Milwaukee took a 3-0 lead in the World Series. No one would take credit for anything; it was always someone else that deserved the attention.
Certainly much of that can be traced back to Murphy, who turned out to be the ideal person to blend all of this together. Murphy is a character, maybe not quite in the Casey Stengel mold but certainly a manager who fits into that tradition. His pregame news conferences have become virtual standup routines, though you would never go so far as to call Murphy a clown, as Stengel was in his early days before he joined the Yankees.
Murphy has the unique capacity to make his players feel empowered and essential while helping them through the inevitable hard times that come with transitioning into the majors. But he can be stern, too, when it’s needed. Even when the Brewers were 10 games out in front of the division or up handily in a playoff series, Murphy would shake his head and insist his team had things to work on.
“He’ll never say we play perfect baseball, but that’s the way you have to be,” Woodruff said. “And he does a great job of getting the most out of everybody. That’s why he’s special.”
The players feel the same about Woodruff and Yelich, the first captain in Milwaukee history.
Even as spectators are dazzled by watching Misiorowski light up the pitch trackers and Chourio light up first pitches and Lara channel Spud Webb to soar over a fence to rob a homer and Turang range far to his right to make an impossible backhand play up the middle, in the clubhouse it begins with the vets.
“They’re a big part of the reason why we go,” Turang said. “They’ve had experiences that some of us have never had, and they’re trying to teach us those experiences and how to get through them. They’re definitely a big part of this for sure.”
In Milwaukee, the message has been consistent from nearly everybody who wears the uniform, going back into the regular season. The Brewers win because everyone is in it together, playing for each other and rooting for the success of their teammates as much as they do for themselves.
These Brewers are good at everything on the field that can be measured, but they are just good at the things that can’t.
“Last year we were like this,” Woodruff said. “You get a group that’s the same group, basically that’s a year older, more experienced, and you got Murph who really doesn’t let us buy into not being great. A lot of it has to do with him, and a lot of it has to do with the guys in the room buying into his message.”
THE BREWERS’ FIRST championship is the missing chapter in a 58-year history that began implausibly, fleetingly, in Seattle. Since finding a home in Wisconsin, the Brewers have built one of baseball’s most unique cultures, an outgrowth of a unique state with an unshakeable loyalty to its sports franchises.
That much was on full display this week on the Gulf Coast of Florida, as the low-slung, palm-tree-lined streets of St. Petersburg were inundated by fans sporting the blue and yellow of the Brewers.
“The atmosphere here with the amount of Brewers fans, you can feel it,” outfielder Garrett Mitchell said. “It started in batting practice [before Game 3]. Lots of ‘Let’s go Brewers’ chants. To have that on the road, pretty special.”
Milwaukee’s first World Series title came in 1957 — to a Braves team that would move to Atlanta within a decade. By 1966, Bud Selig was leading a manic campaign in Milwaukee to bring baseball back after that painful departure.
After the 1969 season, the expansion Seattle Pilots went bankrupt and Selig, after multiple disappointments in his quest, seized the opportunity. When he finally got the news that he and his partners had landed the club that he quickly renamed Brewers, there was one week to prepare before the start of the 1970 regular season. Selig, in his autobiography, said the subsequent week was such a blur that he remembered little of the specifics from that time.
When it comes to this championship, though, he and the rest of the baseball community in the state of Wisconsin have had plenty of time to ponder what this night would feel like. The 57-year wait for the Brewers’ first title is among the longest of any of the existing franchises.
The Phillies had to wait 77 years from the inception of the World Series before they finally won it in 1980. The Padres, who joined the major leagues in the same season as the Pilots but have remained in their original home, are at 57 years and counting. Three other franchises — Colorado, Seattle and Tampa Bay — are still looking for a first title, but none has been around as long as the Brewers.
The wait is over. The franchise that gave us Bernie Brewer whooshing down his slide after homers, the seventh-inning renditions of the “Beer Barrel Polka,” the sausage races, the comedic stylings and damn-good play-by-play chops of Bob Uecker, the tradition of tailgating wherever there is space to set up a couple of lawn chairs next to a cooler and a grill has come full circle. The Brewers are finally all grown up.
The Brewers are as history-forward as any team. There’s a Uecker statue in the top row of American Family Field (“I must be in the front row!”). There are frequent appearances from players of the past, even non-stars. The Milwaukee fans love them all. During the postseason, we’ve seen Larry Hisle, Mike Moustakas, Carlos Gomez, Mike Caldwell, Eric Thames, Jerry Augustine, Braun, Yount and Selig. Jerseys of Hank Aaron, Rollie Fingers, Uecker, Young and Molitor are the first things you see hanging in lockers when you enter the Brewers clubhouse.
“It’s important to connect the people with the legacy of this franchise,” Arnold said before Game 1. “Guys like Robin Yount throwing out the first pitch today, and Paul Molitor throwing out the first pitch tomorrow. Having that connection to the history of our team is super important.”
The by-product of all this is lineage. Yount has written what it meant to him to be teammates as a teenager in the majors at a tender age with Aaron, by then already baseball’s all-time home run champ. Yount has become friends with Yelich, who sought Yount’s blessing before he accepted the team’s offer to make him captain.
“It is the culture,” said Andrew Vaughn, whose game went to another level after he was acquired from the White Sox in 2025. “As soon as you get here. I remember walking in the doors and feeling the buzz inside the clubhouse. The coaching staff, everybody. It’s just that feeling of you want to buy into it, just being the best version of yourself that can help the team.”
Every player, coach and manager on this first-ever Brewers championship team is not just now a member of that lineage; they are part of what is to be a touchstone group in Wisconsin as long as baseball is played there.
It’s an honor that would mean a lot in any city, but perhaps it means more in Milwaukee because of the fervor and because of how long they’ve all waited together. Now and forever, the Brewers are off the list of title-free teams. Strike up “Beer Barrel Polka” and let Bernie slide deep into the night and beyond.
At long last, the Brewers are the champs.
