Milwaukee had posted impressive regular seasons before, only to falter in October. But this year, it was baseball’s best team all along—and now it has the World Series win to prove it.

The Milwaukee Brewers had become so good at doing more with less that it sometimes became hard to imagine them doing the most and winning it all. Manager Pat Murphy self-deprecatingly called his club the “Average Joes” for multiple seasons, as his players always punched above their weight, despite their lack of national stardom. The Brewers have been consistently smarter than almost every other team over the past few seasons, and their tremendous roster depth was always viewed as a nice regular-season story. But it became convenient to say that their lack of top-end stars—better referred to as high-paid household names—was a permanent October hindrance.

Milwaukee had posted impressive regular seasons before. The Brewers had gone one-and-done in October multiple times in the 2020s; then, last season, their offense sputtered in the NLCS, which they lost to the Dodgers in a sweep. They had become maestros of beating preseason projections, but each playoff exit made the next summer’s success easier to wave away. We knew that they could win their division. Winning multiple playoff series had proved to be much harder. Fans who grew up going to games at County Stadium, Miller Park, and now American Family Field may have thought that a World Series win would never come. 

We’re wired to stick to our priors, and our opinions don’t usually change quickly. The acknowledgment of change doesn’t usually come until it’s in hindsight, once it’s undeniable. 

The Dodgers were chasing a three-peat this season, and much of the baseball commentariat treated them as champions-in-waiting. Not even October randomness was viewed as a likely deterrent to their looming coronation. But that notion required you to overlook what Milwaukee had spent six months doing. Past Brewers teams had given us reasons to doubt, but this one kept giving us reasons to reconsider. Milwaukee won 103 games this season, beat the Dodgers head-to-head in the regular season and the NLCS, and was the younger and more complete team. When the Brewers beat the Rays in five games to win their first World Series, they proved that baseball’s best team had been hiding in plain sight all along. 

There’s rarely one moment that serves as the sole turning point of an entire playoff run. Especially one as dominant as Milwaukee’s 11-2 October. But even baseball’s best team had to overcome two moments of existential playoff dread. The first came in the waning moments of Game 2 against San Diego in the NLDS. The Padres had Mason Miller—without question the best closer in the league this year—on the mound and were leading by a run. They were one out away from evening the series and stealing home field. The Brewers worked three walks off Miller and extended the lineup until Jackson Chourio could hit a 2-2 pitch back up the middle to win 4-3. Milwaukee better than anyone at finding hidden edges, and it appeared that Sal Frelick found a tell and signaled from second base to Chourio which pitch was coming before Miller’s delivery. 

The second sequence sparked the first of the four comebacks they needed to vanquish the extravagant and excellent Dodgers empire. Brice Turang’s home run off Tarik Skubal to tie Game 1 of the NLCS in the fourth inning will ultimately end up as a footnote in the Brewers’ demolition of the 2026 playoffs. But it was the swing that soothed nervous fans across Wisconsin, and it explains how Milwaukee went from getting swept by Los Angeles last October to winning the whole damn thing a year later. 

Through three innings of Game 1 of the 2026 NLCS, little seemed to have changed. Milwaukee struck out six times and managed just one hit. The Dodgers had already scratched across a run. It would have been ridiculous to judge a 103-win team based on three innings. But after the previous October, it was also enough to make the question unavoidable: What if all that winning had brought Milwaukee back to ultimately falter at the same place? The doubts of bullpen collapses and silent offenses of Octobers past knocked on the Brewers’ door, but they kept it closed. 

Turang hit an opposite-field homer against lefty ace Skubal, whom Milwaukee had controversially passed on acquiring at the trade deadline. It was a pitch that the Brewers second baseman probably wouldn’t have had the bat speed to catch up to two years ago. Back then, Turang had a .665 OPS and sat in the bottom 5 percent in both barrel rate and bat speed. Now, he is one of the best offensive second basemen in the sport, with an improved barrel rate, more bat speed, and an elite eye. At 26, he’s the poster child for Milwaukee’s internal development.

Even after his major offensive leap in 2025, Turang slashed .114/.162/.229 in nine playoff games last year. This year, Turang had a .404 OBP in the postseason, and his elite defense was on full display during the World Series as the Rays repeatedly pounded hard-hit ground balls to him at second base. 

The next 3.5 games left no doubt that the Brewers had not just caught up to the formerly inevitable Dodgers but had surpassed the aging champions. This Milwaukee offense was much better equipped than its predecessors. It hit the ball harder. It zagged against baseball’s pulled fly ball revolution. It used all fields. Its lineup played deeper than it had in past years.  

“They’re almost playing perfect baseball,” Dodgers utility man Kiké Hernández said. 

Fans who had spent the season fearing that their team would again capitulate in October now had to consider a much more exciting, and even more nerve-racking, possibility. The Brewers were more than good enough to win the whole thing, and there was only one series left. And they would enter as the clear favorites. 

Milwaukee's improved depth changed lefty Aaron Ashby’s role; he’d spent a chunk of the 2025 playoffs as an emergency opener because the Brewers didn’t have enough reliable starters. Ashby opened three different playoff games in 2025 and allowed runs in two of them. He appeared in seven of the Brewers’ nine playoff games in a variety of roles because Milwaukee trusted only Freddy Peralta to make a traditional start. 

A year later, Ashby had the most dominant reliever run in MLB postseason history. He threw 18 scoreless innings without allowing a run, a new record. He appeared in nine games and saved three of them. He tossed three shutout innings in the clinching games of both the NLDS against San Diego and the NLCS against Los Angeles. He was deployed in nearly every role possible for a playoff reliever and dominated in every single one of them. He didn’t win World Series MVP like Madison Bumgarner in 2014 or Yoshinobu Yamamoto last year, but if there were an award for the best player of the entire playoffs, Ashby should unquestionably be the winner. 

Last October, Murphy’s announcement that Ashby would open a playoff game was met with sighs and disapproving groans from fans, who wondered why they couldn't find someone else. Now, Ashby will be lionized as one of the greatest Brewers playoff pitchers of all time. 

After the 2024 season, Jake Bauers nearly retired from baseball due to fatigue, until the birth of his son pushed him back into the game for health insurance. Last year, he hit near the bottom of the Milwaukee lineup in the three NLCS games he started. He was mostly an afterthought in the series, with two hits and one RBI in nine at-bats. A year later, his 12-pitch walk against Yamamoto turned the tide in Game 2 of the NLCS. His two-run homer off Blake Snell swung Game 3, and his three RBIs cemented the sweep of the Dodgers. Bauers, Turang, and Ashby propelled the Brewers past the Dodgers, only for a whole new crop of players to emerge as the Brewers’ top performers in the World Series. 

The biggest names changed in the World Series, but the relentlessness didn’t. In Game 2, Tampa Bay handed its ace and Cy Young candidate Drew Rasmussen a 4-0 lead in the first inning. That’s a cushion that should have allowed one of baseball’s best run-prevention machines to cruise to a series split at one coming home. Milwaukee erased it anyway. There was no comfortable pocket of the Brewers lineup that let the Rays catch their breath. Milwaukee replied with two runs in the first and then slowly kept chipping away. Frelick smacked a homer. David Hamilton drew an infield error. Cooper Pratt roped a single. The same depth that had exhausted the Dodgers was now wearing down the Rays, who were built to win exactly this kind of game. In many ways, Milwaukee and Tampa were looking at each other through a mirror. But the Brewers kept finding one more hitter to help score—and leaving the Rays with one fewer bullpen arm to answer.

The Brewers are so relentlessly deep that Ashby, Bauers, and Turang—whose improvements and contributions were essential to Milwaukee’s mountaintop climb—were not even in the main conversation for World Series MVP by the end of the series. That race was instead dominated by William Contreras, Chourio, and the rookie Pratt. Their ace pitcher, Jacob Misiorowski, and their captain and former MVP, Christian Yelich, didn’t even have to be at their best in the playoffs for Milwaukee to win 11 of 13 playoff games and stake its claim as one of the most dominant champions in recent history. 

The MLB playoff format changed in 1995 to include a full league divisional series. Since then, it’s required 11 playoff wins to win a World Series. There are only two teams that have ever gone 11-1—the 1999 Yankees and 2005 White Sox. The Brewers are one of three to go 11-2 (joining the 1998 Yankees and 2022 Astros), and they’re also one of three teams to win the final two rounds in five or fewer. Milwaukee played incredibly close individual games throughout the playoffs—especially in the NLDS against San Diego—but had a remarkable ability to out-execute opponents in the highest-leverage situations. And the 1.38 bullpen ERA in the postseason certainly didn’t hurt.  

Milwaukee became the fourth World Series champion in the 21st century to surpass 100 wins and a 200-plus run differential. The 2016 Cubs, 2018 Red Sox, and 2022 Astros are the only other teams in the modern era that have met that mark. 

Milwaukee’s playoff run has leveraged analytics in a way that makes this brand of baseball entertaining to watch. This flies against the narrative that the sport has developed a “three true outcomes” problem. The Brewers moved back in the box, shortened up their swings, improved their swing decisions, and maintained excellent bat speed numbers as a team. They play baseball somewhat differently, and their edge has been developed and honed over multiple iterations of this core of players.  

The Brewers finished the season 19th in payroll, per Spotrac. As MLB prepares to fight over what a team should cost, Milwaukee has shown us a whole new baseball achievement. It improved players, revived careers, and found advantages until there were no opponents left standing. It proved that there are multiple ways to win, that the regular season matters, and that there’s a new standard for what a baseball team can be.

Anthony Dabbundo

Anthony Dabbundo writes about all things sports and is a podcast host featured on Ringer Wise Guys and The Ringer’s Philly Special. He is a graduate of Syracuse University, and a proud Philadelphian who spends his summers at Citizens Bank Park.