The Morning Horsehide Herald — the Twenty-Fourth of October, Two Thousand and Twenty-Six

Is it spring training yet? No — the pennants are being decided, and spring must wait its turn.

The Game of the Day

FOUR-AND-FORTY YEARS BETWEEN SERIES EVENINGS, AND MILWAUKEE MAKES THE NEW ONE PAY — BREWERS 3, RAYS 2, IN AN OPENER THE CREAM CITY NINE HAD TO WIN TWICE

Misiorowski Opens the 122nd World's Series With the Fastest Pitch the Event Has Ever Heard, Yelich's Triple States the Early Terms, and the Fireworks Go Off One Out Too Soon Before Megill Settles the Matter for Good

The fireworks went off a batter early. With the bases full of Rays and two out in the ninth, Liam Hicks rapped a ground ball to the right side; Brice Turang gathered it, wheeled, and fired to the rookie shortstop Cooper Pratt, who relayed to first for what 43,250 beneath the closed roof took — with the scoreboard's enthusiastic agreement — for a game-ending double play. Smoke from the celebratory charges still hung over the diamond when the replay bureau, consulted from Tampa Bay's corner, found Pratt's right foot a bootlace's width off the second-base bag. The out at first stood; the force at second did not; Jorge Mateo crossed with the second Tampa Bay run, and a championship evening had to be won over again, 3-2 now and the tying man ninety feet from home.³ Trevor Megill, equal to the inconvenience, struck out Jonny DeLuca to end the game a second and final time — and to seal the first World's Series victory a Milwaukee club has recorded in 44 years.

It had begun, hours earlier, with a message. Jacob Misiorowski's first offering of the night sailed high to Yandy Díaz and arrived at 103.5 miles the hour — the fastest pitch the World's Series has seen since the measuring instruments were installed, and a ball, which tells you everything about the terms on offer: not always around the plate, never comfortable.⁴ The Milwaukee first spoke more conventionally. Jackson Chourio singled, Christian Yelich — the captain, eleven seasons into the waiting — lined a triple to center to score him, and William Contreras singled Yelich home before an out had been made. Two runs after one inning, and Nick Martinez, the surprise starter this paper examined at length yesterday morning, spent the rest of his five innings making the early damage stand as the whole of it.

The middle innings belonged to the arms. Misiorowski gave five innings of one-run ball — four hits, a walk, three strikeouts, the lone run scored on Hicks' fourth-inning groundout after Jonathan Aranda walked and Junior Caminero doubled — and the bullpen inherited a 2-1 lead with the air of men collecting a familiar parcel. Abner Uribe and Aaron Ashby carried it through the eighth, and in the seventh Milwaukee bought its insurance honestly: Pratt worked a walk, and Chourio's second single of the night fetched him around. That run, dismissed as a comfort at the time, proved by evening's end to be the championship margin.

So the ledger opens: Milwaukee one game to none, with history leaning on the winner's side of the table — in postseason play, clubs taking the first game of a best-of-seven have claimed the series 128 times in 199, and those that did it at home under the present two-three-two travel scheme have finished the argument in 70 of 104 tries.¹⁰ The second game comes tonight at eight o'clock Eastern, same roof, with Drew Rasmussen (16-5, 2.67) carrying Tampa Bay's answer against the rookie Logan Henderson (11-3, 2.47), before the Series removes to St. Petersburg on Monday.¹⁰

News Around the League

THE RECORD DESK: ONE PITCH, ONE RECORD — 103.5 FOR MISIOROWSKI'S FIRST OFFERING, EIGHT-AND-THIRTY MORE AT A HUNDRED OR BETTER, AND THE MARKS OF CHAPMAN AND SYNDERGAARD SWEPT OFF THE BOOKS IN A SINGLE EVENING

The record required no waiting at all. The first pitch of this World's Series — Misiorowski to Díaz, taken high for a ball — was posted at 103.4 on the stadium boards and corrected upward to 103.5 by the league's measuring system, making it the fastest pitch ever recorded in the event. The mark it retired belonged to Aroldis Chapman, whose 103.2 for the Cubs in the ninth inning of the second game of 2016 had stood a decade; the fastest previous offering by a starting pitcher was Noah Syndergaard's 101.1 for the Mets in 2015. Both fell before the Milwaukee man had recorded an out.⁴

The evening's full inventory reads like a misprint. Misiorowski threw 38 pitches at 100 miles the hour or better — the old Series high was 24, by Chapman in the fifth game of 2016, and the most by a starter had been six, by Tampa Bay's own Tyler Glasnow in the 2020 opener. Thirty of the 38 came in at 101 or better, eleven at 102, three at 103. The capstone sits atop a season already without precedent: 1,115 pitches of 100 or more this year, where the old high since the count began was 673, by Jordan Hicks of St. Louis in 2018.⁴ And the heat was a staff inheritance, not a solo turn — Milwaukee's pitchers as a body averaged 100.1 miles the hour on the 79 fastballs they threw in the opener.³

The one figure that keeps the ledger honest: all that fire drew just seven swings-and-misses, and the strikeout column read three.⁴ The Rays put the ball in play against the fastest arm alive and lost anyway — which may be the most discouraging reading of the night available to them.

THE LABOR DESK: WITH TWO SO-CALLED SMALL MARKETS CONTESTING THE CHAMPIONSHIP, THE COMMISSIONER ARGUES THE SPECTACLE PROVES THE NEED FOR A SALARY CAP — THE UNION REPLIES THAT THE SCOREBOARD HAS JUST FINISHED REFUTING HIM

Before the first pitch Friday, the commissioner of baseball stood on the field at Milwaukee and performed a feat of interpretation the Herald records with professional admiration. Rob Manfred allowed that a Rays-Brewers World's Series is good for the sport, then argued that it strengthens, rather than weakens, the owners' case for a salary cap in the next labor agreement. "I think it shows that we leave a lot on the table in some of our smaller markets by not having them have an opportunity to compete on a regular basis," he said, adding of Milwaukee: "The Brewers have been a well-run franchise forever... Once every 40 years is not enough."⁵

The players' side declined the premise. Bruce Meyer, interim executive director of the union, observed that the present system has just delivered both pennants to clubs the owners call small, and named the device for what it is: "The salary cap is the opposite of competition. The salary cap tells teams you can't compete too much... The results of these playoffs obviously further undermine their argument for why they think they want it." Meyer conceded the players walk a fine line — no one on the labor side wishes owners to conclude that winning requires no spending, and he doubts it does: "I don't think you could win that way in the long term."⁵

The Herald's sympathies in this quarrel are a matter of long record, and it asks only that the poverty under discussion be inspected. By the most recent Forbes reckoning, the two paupers contesting the championship are valued at $1.9 billion (Milwaukee, up 12 percent in a year) and $1.7 billion (Tampa Bay, up 36 percent) — the 21st and 24th fortunes among thirty, every one of them immense.⁶ The clubs pleading hardship own, between them, the two best records in baseball. The negotiation proper arrives quickly — the current agreement expires at the end of November — and the paper will report that argument faithfully when it comes, with the ledger kept open on the table while it does.⁵

THE MUSTER DESK: THE 50-50 TOSSUP LANDS HEADS — WOODRUFF TAKES THE LAST PLACE ON MILWAUKEE'S ROLL AFTER FOUR SILENT MONTHS, PATRICK YIELDS IT, AND TAMPA BAY RESTORES A LEFT-HANDER OF ITS OWN

The verdict this paper left hanging Friday morning came down for sentiment and velocity alike: Brandon Woodruff is a World's Series Brewer. The club added its longest-tenured pitcher to the roster hours before the opener, Chad Patrick yielding the place, and kept its accustomed books of 13 pitchers and 13 position men.⁷

The case had to clear every obstacle this paper has catalogued through the week — a shoulder that last threw a competitive pitch on the 4th of July, a surgery scheduled and then cancelled when the August imaging showed healing nobody expected, a two-month throwing program, and the simulated game this past Tuesday in which the fastball, down to 87 miles the hour when he left in July, reported back in the low 90s. The rule-book hazard stands as written: should the twice-angry shoulder complain anew, the league would likely refuse a substitute, and Milwaukee would finish the Series a man short. The club weighed the risk and took the pitcher. "Getting to the point where I'm at now was all I could ask for," Woodruff said. "I've probably made their decision a little bit harder, which is a good problem for them. I'm lucky." His general manager put the sentiment in harder currency: "This is a guy that's one of the most successful, dominant big-game pitchers I've ever been around."⁷

Across the field the Rays did their own restoring, activating the left-hander Garrett Cleavinger, who was promptly spent on two-thirds of an inning of scoreless relief in the loss. Both wards now stand essentially empty — a championship contested, as this paper noted it would be, at something close to full strength.

THE LARCENY DESK: THE SPOTLESS LEDGER TAKES ITS FIRST TWO BLOTS — CONTRERAS THROWS OUT MESA AT THIRD AND ARANDA AT SECOND, AND THE RAYS ANSWER THAT THEY WILL KEEP RUNNING ALL THE SAME

This paper wrote Thursday that the Series might be decided on the basepaths, and set out the asymmetry in advance: Tampa Bay perfect on eleven October attempts, Milwaukee the hardest club in baseball to run against. The opener staged the collision, and the Milwaukee catcher won it twice.

The first blot came in the fifth. Victor Mesa Jr., aboard on a leadoff single, broke for third with two out and the count 0-2 to Yandy Díaz — on a 103-mile-an-hour fastball, no less — and William Contreras threw him out to end the inning: the first Ray caught stealing in the entire postseason. The runner's own verdict was unsparing: "Easy to say now, but it was not the best move... I apologize or whatever to my teammates." The second was costlier arithmetic. An inning later, with Aranda at first and one out, the manager Kevin Cash started his slowest runner on a full count to Chandler Simpson — a contact man who had struck out once in 28 postseason trips — reasoning that Simpson would put the ball somewhere or walk. Simpson instead failed to hold his swing on a slider that would have been ball four, Contreras' throw beat Aranda cleanly, and the strike-him-out, throw-him-out double play closed the inning with Junior Caminero, the club's best hitter, standing on deck.⁸

Tampa Bay's response to the evening was not repentance but doctrine. "That's us," said Simpson. "We can't run away from that because that's who we are... Be smart, be conscious of it, and just learn from it going forward."⁸ The box score grants the point half its face: the Rays still stole two bases in the loss — one each for Simpson and the pinch-runner Mateo — and a club built on speed will not be argued out of its legs in one evening. The question the Herald posed Thursday thus survives its first test sharpened: the stop sign now demonstrably exists, and the Rays have announced they intend to keep driving past it.

THE HOMECOMING DESK: TONIGHT THE MAN TAMPA BAY DRAFTED, LOST, AND TRADED FOR TAKES THE BALL AGAINST THE CLUB THAT RAISED HIM — RASMUSSEN WOULD BE CHEERING FOR MILWAUKEE, HE ADMITS, WERE HE NOT EMPLOYED TO BEAT IT

The Series' appetite for reunions, which this paper catalogued Friday, is not yet satisfied. Tonight's second game hands Tampa Bay's hopes to Drew Rasmussen — opposite the organization that drafted him in the sixth round in 2018, took a chance on an arm already twice repaired, gave him his major-league debut in 2020, and traded him to the Rays in May of 2021 in the exchange that sent Willy Adames to Milwaukee. The symmetry runs deeper still: the Rays had drafted Rasmussen first, 31st overall in 2017 out of Oregon State, and lost him when an elbow examination unraveled the signing and led to his second reconstruction. The franchise simply circled back for him four years later.⁹

The man himself declines to pretend indifference. "Had the Brewers been playing anyone else in the World Series, man, I'd be rooting for them," he said Friday, before adding the professional's codicil: "At the end of the day, it is us they're competing against — and we really want to win a World Series as well."⁹ The assignment is no sentimental errand. Rasmussen arrives off a 16-5, 2.67 season and an October in which, as this paper has reported, he has scarcely permitted a baserunner, and Tampa Bay requires his best: no club wishes to board the airplane home two games in arrears.

Milwaukee's answer is the rookie Logan Henderson, 11-3 with a 2.47 figure, behind whom the club has won 16 of 20 starts this year, the postseason included. Eight o'clock Eastern, the same closed roof, and the last baseball Milwaukee will host until the weekend's end: the Series removes to St. Petersburg for Monday's third game.¹⁰

One game to none, and the paper confesses the number undersells the evening — few openers in Series memory have required the home club to record the final out twice. The particulars for the sequel hold as published: tonight at eight o'clock Eastern at American Family Field, Rasmussen against Henderson, then Monday the 26th the argument boards for St. Petersburg and three games under the Tropicana roof, with the calendar permitting the question to run as deep as the 31st of October — a seventh game, should it come to that, on All Hallows' Eve.²¹⁰ Milwaukee has now won eight of its nine October games by the same formula — the arms hold, the defense gathers, the offense does just enough — and Tampa Bay has promised, in so many words, to keep running at it. The town that waited 44 years for Friday gets Saturday besides; some civic fortunes, once they turn, turn generous. Until the morrow's dispatch, keep your scorecards near and your enthusiasms nearer.

~ THE HERALD ~

The Herald Acknowledges Its Debts

MLB Box Scores — Saturday, October 24, 2026 — Boxscore
Baseball-Reference.com — Upcoming Dates — Baseball-Reference
Jeff Passan, Trevor Megill escapes 9th-inning jam to close out Brewers' Game 1 win — ESPN
Brewers' Jacob Misiorowski sets WS velocity record on first pitch — ESPN
Jesse Rogers, Manfred: Rays-Brewers World Series good for game, but salary cap still needed — ESPN
Forbes list of the most valuable MLB teams — Wikipedia
Bradford Doolittle, Brewers add pitcher Brandon Woodruff to World Series roster — ESPN
Jorge Castillo, Rays won't ease up on basepaths despite miscues in Game 1 of World Series — ESPN
Adam Berry, In Game 2, Rasmussen will try to beat team he'd otherwise be rooting for — MLB.com
Anthony Castrovince, Adam Berry and Adam McCalvy, Rays-Brewers World Series Game 2 FAQ (8 p.m. ET, FOX/FOX Deportes/FOX One) — MLB.com