The Milwaukee Brewers won the first World Series championship in franchise history on Wednesday night, beating the Tampa Bay Rays 4-1 in Game 5 at Tropicana Field to take the series four games to one. Jacob Misiorowski threw 5 2/3 scoreless innings before calf cramping ended his start, and Trevor Megill finished the game for the save, recording the last out on a groundout. The Rays scored once in the ninth inning, but Milwaukee led 4-0 until then and the celebration began on the field in St. Petersburg. The series began in Milwaukee on October 23.
The case that Milwaukee was the better team is easy to make. The Brewers outscored the Rays 25 to 12 across the five games and won three of the first four, including a 10-1 victory in Game 3 that featured a record-setting eight-run inning, according to MLB.com. Rookie Cooper Pratt tied and then broke a World Series rookie record by recording hits in his fifth and sixth consecutive plate appearances in the clincher. Misiorowski earned the win according to official MLB data, and the bullpen protected the lead. Taken together, a four-run cushion in the finale and a nine-run margin in Game 3 show a team that controlled the series whenever it took the lead. Milwaukee won the first two games at home before taking Game 3 on the road, and in the clincher it scored one run in the second inning, one in the fifth and two in the sixth.
The counterargument is that the series was closer than a 4-1 result suggests. Two of the Brewers’ wins came by a single run, 3-2 in Game 1 and 5-4 in Game 2, and the Rays refused to be swept in Game 4, winning 4-3 in 12 innings on their home field. Tampa Bay entered that game one defeat from elimination and still forced a fifth game, while Milwaukee, which had led the series 3-0, needed another night to close it out. With three of the five games decided by two runs or fewer, a few different bounces could have produced a longer series, and the Rays showed they could compete with the champions throughout. Strip out the nine-run blowout in Game 3 and the Brewers outscored the Rays by only four runs over the other four games, 15 to 11, a margin that shows how thin the gap between the teams could be.
The title matters for a franchise that had never won a championship before. It also shows how deep pitching and young talent can carry a team through October, a lesson other clubs will study over the winter, and it adds a new name to the sport’s list of champions. For Milwaukee fans, a long wait has ended in the biggest way, and the win will influence how the club approaches contracts, trades and expectations for next season, when it will have to defend a title that it had never held before.
Milwaukee finished what it started, winning four of five games and earning a title the franchise has long sought. The Rays can take pride in a series that was closer than the final tally.
