The Right 'Who's: Milwaukee Brewers Win 2026 World Series

[Matthew Trueblood]

This one is for Bob Uecker, but you know that. More importantly, you know what that means, underneath the words—around them, and within them, and between them. If this one is for Bob Uecker, it's for every Brewers fan. If it's for Uecker, it's for every underdog. If it's for Uecker, it's for all of Wisconsin. Mark Attanasio once said he felt it his responsibility not to deliver the Brewers fan base a championship, but to give them "a summer of entertainment and passion and a chance for families to come together". No one was satisfied with that mission statement at the time, but the two goals have turned out not to be in conflict with one another. They've turned out to be complementary, and for the franchise emblemized by Uecker, that shouldn't be such a surprise. Uecker's legacy was made of summers of entertainment and passion—of cold beers and brats and slow-roasted jokes. Uecker branded himself, in a way, the crown prince of losers, but those who knew him knew he was all about winning, and not long after the world lost him, his team won what he always craved for them. The Milwaukee Brewers are World Series champions.

It didn't come easily, though the history books might end up getting confused on that score. The Brewers were never pushed to the brink of elimination, or even to the brink of the brink. They rolled through the playoffs with an 11-2 record, and they nearly became the first team ever to sweep both a four-game League Championship Series and the World Series. Instead, after a disappointing (but not heartbreaking; there was no need for that kind of melodrama) Game 4 loss Tuesday night, the team simply came back to work on Wednesday night and finished the job. Their resiliency and their relentlessness were equally unsurprising. Those are the defining characteristics of this team.

The Tampa Bay Rays were valiant, all things considered. Even the best the American League could offer was no match for these Brewers, and they didn't even make Milwaukee sweat, the way the Padres and Dodgers did at times in the previous series. Tampa didn't give up, though. They fought back from the edge of oblivion in the bottom of the 12th inning Tuesday night, and even though Drew Rasmussen has had his elbow rebuilt three times and he'd been handled carefully all season, manager Kevin Cash gave the ball to Rasmussen to start Game 5, on three days' rest. The AL pennant winners would give the Brewers their best shot. You wouldn't want it to be any other way.

Rasmussen was impressive, too. He's a symbol, in a funny way, of the Brewers' genius and excellence. They traded him for Willy Adames in 2021, and for almost any other team, giving up such a great pitcher would be proof of (at least) a shortcoming in self-scouting. In this case, it was no such thing. Adames was phenomenal for the Brewers over his three-and-a-half-year tenure there; he left the place better than he found it. He was a leader and a producer for them. Besides, the Brewers only had Rasmussen to give up because they believed in him, when hardly anyone else did. He'd been operated on twice in college. He was damaged goods before he even reached the threshold of pro ball, but he bet on himself, over and over. The Brewers bet on him, too. Five and a half years after they traded him, running into him again this way felt like kismet. That didn't mean he would make things easy for him. The competitiveness, resourcefulness and talent the team scouted in him and cultivated after bringing him in were still in evidence. He cut through the Crew in the top of the first like a hot knife through an elbow ligament.

That made it Jacob Misiorowski's turn, though. Unlike Rasmussen, Misiorowski was on full rest, and though he, too, has had a long season and been handled carefully, he had more left in the tank than his counterpart. There was just one problem: the mound. Reaching back for whatever was left in his body for the year, Misiorowski found better stuff than he'd shown in any of his previous postseason appearances, but he couldn't reliably land on firm footing; the dirt at the bottom of the mound (where only Misiorowski reaches, with his singular stride) was loose and treacherous. Still, he sliced through the Rays almost as surgically as Rasmussen had his own side in the first.

Only for that long, though, could the two sides pretend parity. Almost immediately, the game tipped in favor of the better team—indeed, one of the best teams the game has seen in years. From here, instead of narrating moment by moment, let's change things up and go person by person. 

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If Brice Turang's offensive breakout had never happened, he would still play (almost) every day for this team. Sometimes, infielders who seem to suck up everything hit their way are compared to vacuum cleaners, but the metaphor was never more apt than it is with Turang. He moves around the infield like a classic Kirby in the hands of a seasoned housekeeper: quick, gliding, bending effortlessly at hinges you can't even see. He hardly ever dives, but covers more ground than most second baseman do at the edges of their sprawl. With anticipation, quick acceleration and an effortless dip at the waist, he picks grounders breezily and gets rid of the ball almost instantly. He won the Fielding Bible Award this season at second base, and rightfully so.

Turang did have an offensive breakout, though, and it raised expectations in a way that made portions of his second half feel almost disappointing. He played through a knee injury, and his numbers suffered. When the postseason curtain rose, he struggled some more. He'd been poor last October, and when he went 2-for-16 in the NLDS, it was easy to worry that he might have either a lingering physical problem or a mental block about the playoffs that would torpedo the team's hopes. Instead, in Game 1 of the NLCS, he hit the home run off Tarik Skubal that announced that this year would be different. He's been on his game ever since, and was instrumental in the team's sweep of the Dodgers. In the top of the second, against a weary Rasmussen, he got a changeup that stayed up and hit it up the gap in left-center field. It could have been a single; Johnny DeLuca got over and cut it off nicely. Turang was fast out of the box and read it all the way, though. He gained second easily. The table was set.

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After Game 2 of the World Series, Cooper Pratt sat on the dais for the postgame press conference next to teammate Sal Frelick. He looked the way he's looked every day since he got to the majors: big and giddy and a little uneasy, with features that still aren't sure which way to fold when he smiles and shoulders that move more than an easygoing adult's ever would. He's a confident guy, but he's so young, and it's impossible to hide it. He babbles. He giggles, albeit in a husky voice that reminds you he's caught somewhere between late-stage puberty and the gravitas of adulthood. He's trying to do "aw shucks" and "dig me" at the same time, not because he wants to manipulate the way people see him, but because both of those feelings lie authentically alongside one another in him, and he hasn't yet figured out how he might shove one down in favor of the other.

Answering a question about the role Frelick has played in helping him adjust to the majors, Pratt's answer went straight to the only moment for which much of the baseball world knew him, until this week: the instance in July when Pat Murphy benched him for failures of effort and focus in a game at Citi Field in New York. He remembered what Frelick said to him, at that moment.

"There's standards here. There's a way that we play, and it's okay. You're going to be all right," Pratt recalled. If those weren't the exact words of the message, they were the guts of it.

Murphy didn't mean for that benching (a very brief one) to be discouraging—much the opposite. He just wanted a chance to show Pratt just how high the bar is. One thing young players have to learn, when they first reach the majors, is that being great at this level demands more of you—more intensity, more consistency, and more aptitude—than you can imagine, until you butt up against it. For rookies on other teams, it might be ok to let that learning happen slowly and painfully. Not in Milwaukee. Not on the Win Tonight Brewers. Not when the goal and the only acceptable outcome of the season already halfway done was a championship.

Pratt would need a crash course, and that would mean some faster, harsher forms of feedback than other teams might give. It could also mean faster development. It could also mean a kind of flame-tempered excellence that makes a Wisconsin legend of a 22-year-old kid from Florida.

What Murphy has asked of this team over the last three years is not quite impossible. At last, on Wednesday night, they proved that. It is, however, excruciatingly difficult. It's a challenge that can't be set before the wrong person with any hope of success, and the criteria that define the 'wrong person' aren't as simple as shortfalls of talent.

They include those, to be sure. The Brewers needed extraordinarily talented players to create something truly new under the sun: a championship for the franchise that migrated from Seattle in 1970. Pratt is one such player. The team paid $3 million to lure him away from a commitment to play ball for the University of Mississippi, so although he was a sixth-round pick, he entered the professional ranks as well-regarded as many first-rounders. He's tall and strapping, but his swing is short. He won a Minor League Gold Glove Award in 2024, proof of his athleticism at a position usually reserved for smaller players. He's a plus runner.

On top of talent, though, the Brewers decided to prize other traits, too, because that enormous challenge—to play a game that keeps the pressure on the opponent all day; to bounce back quickly after losses and to gather steam from wins; to be the deepest and most close-knit team in the league despite fewer resources than other teams had to forge that depth and savor greater stability—places demands on personality, in addition to prodigality. That's why Murphy is insistent and repetitive about the importance of "the right 'who'". That sounds nebulous, and it has to be a little bit so, because if it were too tightly defined, it wouldn't be sufficiently flexible. That doesn't mean it lacks specifics.

Pratt had to learn what to expect at the plate, and how to anticipate his own successes and failures. He had to learn what was required of him between games and during them, and knowing that the same things were required of everyone on the team made it possible to get him to buy in.

The Rays never did figure out how to get Pratt out. They never even got on the right track. Pratt stepped up for his first at-bat of Game 5 with two on and one out, and on the first pitch he saw, he gave Milwaukee a 1-0 lead. It was no fluke or flare—no mishit that relied on a defender being too slow. He shot a line drive into center field for a no-doubt single, and Turang raced around after getting a perfect read off the bat. Pratt would spark the next scoring rally, too, in the fifth inning. Rasmussen had departed the stage by then. It was Kevin Kelly, becoming the latest Rays arm to try fruitlessly to jam Pratt up and in. The rookie singled, and two singles later, he brought home the Crew's second run.

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Murphy's pick for a 2026 "quantum leap," as he said it first (with regard to Turang) two and a half years ago, was David Hamilton. That didn't really materialize during the regular season. Hamilton posted a .650 OPS in 2026, and his defense was uneven: there were great plays, but there were also bad ones. In October, though, the dynamism the manager insisted would come out in time finally peeked through. Hamilton had the nail-in-the-coffin homer in Game 4 of the NLCS, to cap a series in which he batted .571. He worked his way out of a timeshare with Joey Ortiz and started all five games of the World Series (though, to be fair, the Rays started right-handed pitchers in all five contests). 

If October was a story of Hamilton redeeming an unremarkable April through September, he also played out a pair of impressive redemption stories in microcosm in Games 4 and 5 of the Series. On Tuesday night, his error gave the Rays the lead in one half-inning, but he homered to erase it in the next. On Wednesday, at the one moment when Misiorowski wobbled and the Rays threatened to take the lead, Ben Williamson hit a harmless chopper to Hamilton. It was an easy inning-ending grounder, but Hamilton very nearly threw the ball away. Jake Bauers saved his bacon with a stretch, high and up the line, to snare the ball and hold the base. 

In the top of the fifth, after Pratt and Garrett Mitchell each singled, Hamilton got his chance to redeem himself again, and did it. On a 1-1 changeup from Kelly, he lashed the ball through the right side of the infield, at 107 MPH off the bat. That made it 2-0, and it began to feel like the Brewers could breathe—like the celebration countdown was on in earnest, for the first time. It was the final payoff of a last-second pre-spring training trade that was maligned in Milwaukee at first: Caleb Durbin, Andruw Monasterio and Anthony Seigler for Hamilton, Kyle Harrison and Shane Drohan. In turns, earlier in the year, both Harrison and Drohan did plenty to help the Brewers get this far. This month, though, all the benefits of that deal came from Hamilton. He was a game-changing No. 9 hitter—a symbol of the team's lineup depth and a testament to the number of ways they were willing and able to win games.

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'The lion's share' is an expression derived from one of Aesop's Fables. It's often misused, these days. People say it when they mean most of something, but in its original form, the lion's share meant everything. The lion, as absolute ruler of the savanna, meted out justice by arrogating to himself every bit of the kill over which many animals had laid a claim. It was about understanding just how many ways the lion wields power—about how the powerful exert their will in many dimensions, seemingly at once. 

By the top of the sixth inning, the Rays were a kill, and all that was left was to divide it. The Brewers' lion, William Contreras, stepped forward and claimed it all. That's what he's done ever since coming to Milwaukee. He takes the lion's share of the catching duty, if he can help it. He takes the lion's share of the responsibility for his team's successes and failures. When the Brewers flipped Esteury Ruiz for him in the offseason between 2022 and 2023, Contreras was so much a bat-first catcher that few believed he would stick at the spot. He was as full of talent and passion as his new coaches were full of ideas, though, so they all went to work together, and Contreras changed.

The Lion of Milwaukee became, first, a great pitch-framer. Over time, that skill has eroded and had to be rebuilt, but he maintains at least a portion of it. He was already a great thrower, but he's also become a great manager of pitching staffs. His pitchers gush about him. After the game, Misiorowski would credit Contreras with much of the hurler's success throughout the year, and with the shutdown performance in Game 5. Aaron Ashby refused Contreras's offer to share the World Series MVP; he felt too strongly that his catcher deserved it.

October saw Contreras collect value in ever more ways, just like Aesop's lion. He went from disastrous to seamless at blocking pitches in the dirt, seemingly flipping a switch between rounds of the playoffs to do so. He also became razor-sharp at ABS challenges, wasting fewer but missing hardly any opportunities to flip balls into strikes. He spread his influence into every possible facet of run prevention, and by the end of the postseason, he was a positive in all of those aspects.

Contreras has also reinvented himself at the plate. The guy the Brewers acquired was a lethal but erratic slugger. He's become a much more well-rounded hitter in Milwaukee. Some power has been lost, but he still finds it when he needs it. Contreras crushed three home runs during this postseason, after hitting just 18 during the regular campaign. In Game 5, when he came to bat with Christian Yelich on base in the top of the sixth, he got a slider down and in and dropped the bat head on it. It didn't quite carry out of the park, but it became an RBI double and stretched the lead to 3-0. Two batters later, Pratt flicked a fly ball down the right-field line, and Contreras raced home at top speed to make it a sacrifice fly and move it to 4-0. The Brewers' lion leaped to his feet, his helmet flying off to display his shaggy mane, and roared.

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Abner Uribe got a ground ball to first base on the first pitch he threw in the bottom of the seventh inning. Jake Bauers fielded it cleanly and threw to Uribe uneventfully; the high-waisted Dominican righty found the bag and went quietly back to his office in the center of the building buzz. It was a tiny, faint echo—only that. It didn't force itself upon you, but if you've watched Uribe's whole career unfold, it was impossible not to connect that ordinary 3-1 groundout to another grounder to the right side induced by Uribe while facing the Rays, back in 2024. On that occasion, something intemperately defending the honor of ejected teammate Freddy Peralta, Uribe picked a fight with Jose Siri (now long gone from Tampa; not a championship-caliber player or person) and derailed his career for a while,

That brawl drew a suspension, and soon thereafter, Uribe found himself back at Triple-A Nashville. There, he injured his knee and missed almost the rest of the season. Many around the organization—and plenty within it, including his manager—wondered if Uribe would ever be master of his emotions and his mentality enough to turn his unhittable stuff into consistent value. He did, though. By the following spring, Uribe was working hard to express himself better in English, to help the world better understand him. More importantly, though, he made himself better understood within the clubhouse, and he made extra efforts to understand what the team asked of him, too. He's no shrinking violet, even now; you need look no further than his crotch-chopping provocation of the Cardinals this spring to see that. He's become a better teammate, though, and a more emotionally stable, mature professional. Murphy saw the transformation in him, and trusted it. He made him his relief workhorse from the jump in 2025, and that's remained true almost without interruption since. Uribe was downright workmanlike in Game 5. After one tiny blip amid Contreras's greatness—a throwing error that put a runner into scoring position in the seventh—brought him into the game, Uribe slammed the door on any uprising by the home nine. The countdown was down to six outs.

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I interviewed Trevor Megill once about his pitch mix. He told me he works diligently to keep his fastball usage around 69%, and his curveball usage around 31%. The delivery was deadpan, and he was being (relatvely) serious. He takes his craft seriously. He just isn't serious about much else. His stomping overhand delivery and the glower that comes with it are just him in work mode. The rest of the time, he can playfully invoke meme culture or sing-song the latest viral video. He catches teammates' home runs in his hat when waiting in the home bullpen, and celebrates like a kid when he does. He smiles like a 13-year-old whose fart you'll smell in about five seconds. He also throws 100 miles per hour, and he mowed down the Rays in the eighth inning without allowing a baserunner.

One thing Megill does take seriously, within his job but beyond the simple execution of it, is his role. This spring, he made it extremely and unwaveringly clear: he wanted the ninth inning. In the World Series clincher, he got it. He gave up a run in the ninth and was (perhaps) just one batter from losing the right to close it out, as Ashby warmed in the bullpen, but Megill is a true closer. He wants that right, and that privilege. It was fitting, on a team so well-trained to want the right things, that one player who wanted that specific thing got it.

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It wouldn't have been so smooth a bottom of the eighth, though, if not for Jackson Chourio. The running, then diving catch Chourio made to rob Taylor Walls leading off the frame will be remembered less than it would have been if the game or the series had been closer, but it was a perfect example of Chourio's vast defensive improvement in left field late this year. He doesn't make that catch last season; he doesn't even make it in June. Chourio, though, has steadily emerged as this team's truest superstar. Contreras is the pounding heart, and Misiorowski might be its face. Turang is one of the game's great well-rounded players. Chourio, though, is the legend in this group. The last Milwaukee team to win a World Series, in 1957, featured 11 hits from a 23-year-old outfielder named Henry Aaron. That was a seven-game Fall Classic, though. Chourio got 11 hits in just five contests. He won't win his league's MVP award this year, as Aaron did in 1957, but that the young Venezuelan got to put his mark on the final stages of the game was inevitable. He will win an MVP someday; he might win another Series, too.

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One reason why Attanasio's "summer of entertainment and passion" quote was so ill-received is that, for many fans, it was hard to maintain passion for a team that was forever changing. The Josh Hader trade in July 2022 riled and disturbed the fan base; it felt like proof that the Brewers would always make the transactional choice. That meant never Going For It, and for some, it meant that the team would never win a World Series. But it also meant getting rid of great players almost as soon as they got that way. It meant never feeling like a connection would last for as long as you'd wish. That feeling was only compounded, of course, when Craig Counsell left for Chicago.

That's part of what makes this team so special. There will be turnover; make no mistake about that. No team stays exactly the same from one year to the next, and no Brewers team will ever border on doing so. Even if there were no rising arbitration price tags or free agencies on the horizon, the team would need to make room for a bevy of young players who need more playing time (or even a roster spot they don't yet have to spare) in 2027 and beyond. But this team is made of players who will stick around for quite a while. 

Chourio, Pratt and Luis Lara all signed long-term extensions with the team, and all three are under 23 years old. Logan Henderson and Misiorowski are years from free agency, too. Murphy, it's safe to say, will retire as a Brewer, even if that retirement might be coming up sooner than it would ordinarily be for a skipper just three years into their big-league career. The front office committed to this group, because they know they're the right 'who's. Murphy has molded them, and allowed them to mold him. This group of players, coaches, front-office workers and support staff has gelled in a way that even most other great winners can only dream of. They aren't truly done; this doesn't have to mark the end of anything.

However, it does mark the end of something important: decades of waiting. For fans (and fans' parents and grandparents) throughout Wisconsin, the wait for this moment has often seemed interminable. It has occasionally seemed hopeless. The Brewers were the league's plaything for far too long—since before they were the Brewers. They floated from Seattle to Milwaukee; from one division to the other in the AL, and then into the newly formed AL Central, and then over to the NL. They were buffeted by chance and purposefully undermined by ownership with dubious motives. They spent a long time lost. No more. The Brewers and their fans have found their place in the league, at last. They're not just underdogs. They can still be underdogs, in some ways, but that's no longer the extent of their identity. They're not cute, anymore. They're great.

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There are already plenty of fans (especially of other teams) who are tired of Murphy's shtick. It's understandable. He overplays his hand sometimes. In the end, though, it's more than his results that are above reproach. His process, however occasionally cheesy or self-serving, is authentic. He believes what he tells players, and only tells them things they should believe—truths, in short. He didn't pull together a ragged band of misfits and turn them into champions. That's the shorthand narrative for outsiders. We know better. The Brewers' deep and incredibly smart roster of front-office analysts worked with their deep and well-trained cadre of scouts to find great players. Their front-office leaders (yes, Matt Arnold, but others, too) took chances and made savvy moves on the advice of all those talent-finders. The ingredients with which Murphy got the pleasure of cooking were very high-quality.

 

Murphy did something remarkable with them, though. The cohesion and dedication he elicited from all those players was extraordinary. For three years (and especially the last season and a half), the level at which this team has played has been historic. They've played winning baseball, and often, they've played truly beautiful baseball. Under Murphy's guidance, they've felled the giants of the sport, and they've slipped the bonds of history, to boot. When Counsell defected, the vacuum he left in the manager's office at Uecker Field was enormous. The Brewers, however, filled it with the right 'who'.

Image courtesy of Kim Klement Neitzel-Imagn Images

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[Brandon Glick]

Congrats, Brewer Fanatic fam!

[Rick Daltons Flamethrower]

Thanks Mattie! We are indeed the 2026 world champs! Appreciate all your articles! Super special season!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[gregmag]

An article fully worthy of a championship team. 

My favorite Brewers interview moment since Brice Turang sadly stopped sounding like a less articulate Jeff Spicoli came tonight from Cooper Pratt, looking thoroughly bewildered: “It only took four months.”

[Matthew Trueblood]

1 minute ago, gregmag said:

An article fully worthy of a championship team. 

My favorite Brewers interview moment since Brice Turang sadly stopped sounding like a less articulate Jeff Spicoli came tonight from Cooper Pratt, looking thoroughly bewildered: “It only took four months.”

He sounded so authentically overjoyed. Hilarious. It sounds like a mean word but it’s a good color on him: dude is a rube.