The Nucleus Burning Inside of the Cell: Milwaukee Brewers Win the 2026 National League Pennant

Image courtesy of Kirby Lee-Imagn Images

Brewers Video

The Milwaukee Brewers joined the National League in 1998, but it took 28 years for them to join the ranks of its champions. At long last, in Game 4 of a thrilling but (ultimately) one-sided National League Championship Series Thursday night, that wait came to an end. For Milwaukee baseball fans, it was 24 years (and one heart-wrenching team relocation) between their last two World Series appearances, in 1958 and 1982. It took 44 more seasons to make it back, but they've done it.

History might soften our sense of how hard-won this pennant was. The Brewers ousted the San Diego Padres in four games in the best-of-five NL Division Series, and they swept the Dodgers in four straight, but almost all of the games in that stretch were close—not only on the scoreboard, but in a way you could feel and see and even hear in the crowds' reactions to it all. Thursday was certainly no exception.

The relatively sparse schedule of the postseason allowed the Brewers to give four of the first six starts of their run to Jacob Misiorowski and Logan Henderson, but in the other games, they had to patch things together. That worked nicely when they got good starts from Robert Gasser in Game 4 of the NLDS and Game 3 of the NLCS, but in Game 3 of the NLDS, Dustin May was unable to give them that stability, and they lost that game. Pat Murphy handed the ball to lefty Shane Drohan, instead, to open Game 4 of the NLCS, but Drohan's control was shaky. He limped through five batters faced and three outs recorded, before May took over. The Dodgers seemed to be overjoyed at the change. Five batters after May entered the fray, it was 4-0 Dodgers.

That didn't stop the Brewers, for they're relentless—no, as Pat Murphy would say, they're f***ing relentless. Tyler Glasnow is a fine symbol of everything the team had to overcome in this series. Here were the scrappy Brewers, cobbling together a pitching plan with the leftovers of their staff, and they had to face a 6-foot-7 Adonis, famously handsome as well as hard-throwing, making $30 million in the middle season of a five-year deal. Glasnow was on, too. The first time through the Brewers' order, he didn't allow a baserunner. His fastball was dotting the edges. His curveball was falling from the sky and landing at the top edge of the strike zone, freezing hitters. But the Brewers are impossible to intimidate or discourage. They stayed ready. They waited for Glasnow to wobble, knowing he would.

In the top of the fourth, Brice Turang worked a six-pitch walk. William Contreras worked a 2-1 count, and when he got a second four-seam fastball on the inside edge in the same at-bat, he tore into it, slashing an automatic double into the left-field corner. Then, on a 3-2 count, Jake Bauers got a true mistake—a fastball right down the middle, which he bashed down the right-field line for another automatic two-bagger. The Dodger lead was suddenly halved. Glasnow did wriggle off the hook from there, though, by getting Christian Yelich and Garrett Mitchell to end the inning and strand Bauers in scoring position.

Undeterred by the brief interruption—indeed, perhaps spurred on by May keeping things under control and giving them some length—the Brewers went right back to work in the top of the fifth. Glasnow was, suddenly, at loose ends. He walked Sal Frelick on five pitches with one out. Frelick stole second during David Hamilton's at-bat, and Hamilton then drove him home with a hard ground ball back up the middle. The deficit had dwindled to one run.

That chased Glasnow from the game, but on came Evan Phillips, an emblem of the Dodgers' recent October untouchability. Phillips entered the game never having given up a run in the playoffs. Technically, he still hasn't, but the Brewers will let that 'technically' warm him up over the cold winter ahead. Phillips almost gave up something big, but Jackson Chourio's line drive found Andy Pages's glove in center field. Instead, he gave up several small things. He intentionally walked Brice Turang after falling behind 3-0 and seeing Hamilton steal second. He walked Contreras, not coming especially close on any of the balls in the sequence. Then, on four pitches, he walked Bauers. Tie game. F***ing relentless.

In the top of the sixth, Garrett Mitchell finished off the defending champions, with a go-ahead home run that would prove all they needed. The bullpen shut the Dodgers down unforgivingly; they slowly choked the life out of them. JoJo Romero, the least-heralded of the team's trade-deadline acquisitions in early August, mowed down six of the seven Los Angeles batters he saw. Aaron Ashby took the ball in the seventh, and he never gave it back. He allowed two doubles, but it didn't matter. When he needed to make a pitch, he made one. He carved Ohtani back into ribbons, after the Brewers' 2025 bogeyman had seemed to reconstitute himself on that huge early swing, striking out Ohtani with a runner on third and one out in the seventh. He dominated.

It's baseball without reciprocity. The Brewers make everything hard for you, but you can't make anything hard for them. They're endlessly resilient, but they find ways to smother you—to prevent you from feeling that same spark of ongoing hope in the face of adversity. They're better than you, and they want it more than you.

On the inside of Murphy's right arm is a tattoo that reads "200 Club". It's a simple motto, in a simple code. Take every letter of the alphabet and assign it a number based on its placement in the line, and if you swap the letters out for those numbers, the ones in "F***ing relentless" add up to 200. Murphy didn't get his chance to be a big-league manager until he was 65 years old. He's the ultimate late bloomer. He took over a team full of players whose career arcs look much like his, and he's infused them with his on-field personality. It's about attention to detail, and a thorough understanding of just how hard this is all gonna be, and a lack of fear of embracing all that difficulty. It's about being undaunted, and it's about being smart. And it's about understanding how to weigh both words.

Profanity is part of baseball's language—its music. It's part of how the people who love the game enough to withstand its slings and arrows and to survive the grind from February all the way to the end of October communicate to one another their understanding that regular words don't quite capture it all. You have to have an ear for it to really understand it. You have to have been through a slump, or watched your favorite player do it. You have to have rehabbed a shoulder injury and come back a year later, or watched your best friend try to do it but fail. You have to have played 17 days in a row, and still been pissed at yourself (instead of the schedule-makers) when you chased a pitch you shouldn't have on Day 17.

If you've felt some of that—if, say, you know the pain of having lost Game 7 in 1982, and having been poorly run for a long time and mired in losing, and of Chris Taylor catching that f***ing ball in 2018 and of Pete Alonso hitting that f***ing homer in 2024—then you know that 'relentless' isn't enough to win a pennant. You absolutely must be f***ing relentless, and you must understand that first word as more than an obscenity. It's a modifier. It's proof that the desire to excel at a game that defies excellence and to dominate in a game that subverts dominance burns in you, down all the way to the atomic level. It says you know what you're up against.

The 2026 Brewers knew what they were up against, all along. So did their opponents, maybe, but in their case, it wasn't enough, because what they were up against was the 2026 Brewers.

There's more work for this team to do. There's one more monkey on the franchise's back. The Brewers have never won a World Series, and it certainly won't be easy to do it against the Rays or Guardians. Come next Friday, though, Jacob Misiorowski will get the ball for Game 1 of the Fall Classic, before a full house at The Ueck, and that crowd will already feel lighter and freer than it's ever been before. Something huge has been done. They only need four more wins to become the unquestioned champions of the baseball world.

More to come. Much more. For the moment, though: enjoy this, Milwaukee fans. Though they've been a very, very good team for a decade, now, this is a once-in-a-generation moment.