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

THE MORNING HORSEHIDE HERALD

"Every Score Set Down, No Deed Unsung"

~ Being a Faithful Daily Chronicle of the National Pastime ~

Volume I · No. 113 · Thursday, the Twenty-Ninth of October, Two Thousand and Twenty-Six

Reporting 1 contest from the day prior.

The Game of the Day

CHAMPIONS OF THE WORLD AT LAST — BREWERS 4, RAYS 1, THE SERIES IN FIVE, AND SEVEN-AND-FIFTY SEASONS OF WAITING END AT 11:13 UNDER THE TROPICANA ROOF

Misiorowski Scoreless Into the Sixth Until His Own Calf, Not a Ray, Removes Him; Pratt's Sixth Hit in Succession Breaks a 48-Year-Old Rookie Mark; Megill Gets the Groundout That Crowns Milwaukee; and 31,000 Fill the Ballpark Back Home to Watch a Scoreboard

The Milwaukee Brewers are champions of the world. The sentence has waited 57 seasons to be set in type — through the franchise's birth as the Seattle Pilots in 1969, through the seven-game heartbreak of 1982 in St. Louis, through eight Octobers entered in the last nine years and every one of them ended by another club's celebration — and it became true at 11:13 Wednesday night in St. Petersburg, 10:13 on the clocks of Wisconsin, when Richie Palacios chopped Trevor Megill's pitch to Brice Turang at second base and the throw beat him to the bag. Brewers 4, Rays 1; the Series, four games to one. Back home, 31,000 had filled American Family Field to watch on the scoreboard a game played 1,200 miles away, and what they saw was the city's first baseball championship since the Braves' of 1957 — won in the 44th year since Milwaukee last reached a Series, by a club that plays beneath Henry Aaron's retired No. 44.3

A day after Tampa Bay tore the championship page out of the book in the twelfth inning — the reprieve these columns chronicled yesterday — Milwaukee simply wrote it over again, this time in ink. Jacob Misiorowski, handed the assignment yesterday's paper called the best arm in the game, was exactly that: 5 2/3 scoreless innings on two hits, 51 of his pitches arriving at 100 miles an hour or better, until a cramping calf — no Tampa bat managed it — removed him in the sixth.35 The rookie Cooper Pratt singled home Turang in the second for a fifth consecutive hit, then singled again in the fifth for a sixth — breaking Brian Doyle's 48-year-old record for a rookie in a World's Series, making him the first man of any tenure with six straight Series hits since David Ortiz in 2013, and leaving him one shy of Billy Hatcher's all-time seven — and came around on David Hamilton's knock moments later.65 William Contreras doubled home Christian Yelich in the sixth, Pratt's sacrifice fly made it 4-0, and the evening's remaining suspense concerned only the champagne. Drew Rasmussen, who took the ball on three days' rest after all despite his club's stated reluctance, gave four honest innings and was charged with the loss; six relievers followed him.9

Tampa Bay's lone answer came in the ninth, when Liam Hicks' double struck first base and caromed away crazily and Chandler Simpson doubled him home. Megill allowed the run and nothing more, got his groundout, and threw his fists at the tilted white roof.3 The record-keepers will want a week with this club. Milwaukee finished its October 11 wins against 2 defeats, only the fifth club ever to win eleven postseason games while losing two or fewer; it allowed more than four runs in none of its thirteen contests, a thing done by a champion previously only by the 1983 Orioles and the 1990 Reds; and it welded that October to a franchise-record 103-win season, the best in the game.53

Then came the scenes a city rehearses for 57 years. Yelich, the captain, who arrived in 2018 and stayed for this: "I blacked out on the field as soon as I saw 'Rang throw it over to first base. I don't remember what happened. I think I ran to Megill first. What a feeling." Robin Yount, who wore Milwaukee's colors in the 1982 defeat, sought out the 22-year-old Pratt amid the delirium to tell him, "You're one heck of a shortstop." And the manager Pat Murphy, 67 years old and lately acquainted with every variety of October grief, put the season's epitaph plainly: "We came in with a spirit about us, and we weren't going to be denied."36

News Around the League

THE LAURELS DESK: CONTRERAS, MASTER OF THE NEW CHALLENGE SYSTEM AND WARDEN OF THE RUNNING GAME, TAKES THE WILLIE MAYS TROPHY — THE FIRST CATCHER SO HONORED SINCE 2015, AND A CHAMPION TWICE IN A SINGLE YEAR

The Most Valuable Player of this World's Series is its catcher. William Contreras, 28, stood at the center of the podium with the Willie Mays trophy aloft, having gone 8-for-21 with four runs batted in — among them the sixth-inning double that scored Yelich with the insurance run of the clinching game — while his pitchers compiled a 1.91 earned-run average and held Tampa Bay to a .182 figure for the five games. He is the eighth catcher to take the Series' highest individual honor and the first since Salvador Perez in 2015.4

The work behind the plate was the argument. The Rays arrived having stolen eleven bases in eleven October attempts; Contreras threw out four of the nine men who dared him. And in the first season of the automated ball-strike challenge system at the game's highest level, he proved its first October master: 10 of his 13 challenges in the Series were overturned in Milwaukee's favor, against a regular-season rate of 60 percent for fielders, and 67 percent across his 33 challenges this postseason. "How he does the ABS thing, I don't know," said Murphy, "but the guy has a knack for it."4 The year now closes in a perfect ring: Contreras, Jackson Chourio and Antonio Senzatela, champions with Venezuela in the spring's World Baseball Classic, become only the second set of teammates to win that tournament and the World's Series in the same year, after Alex Bregman and Luke Gregerson in 2017 — and William joins his brother Willson, champion with the 2016 Cubs, in the tenth brotherhood ever to put a World's Series ring on each hand.5

THE RECORD-BOOK DESK: THE FOURTH-LONGEST WAIT FOR A FIRST TITLE ENDS IN A FORTNIGHT OF DEMOLITION — A BULLPEN AT 1.38, ASHBY'S EIGHTEEN SPOTLESS INNINGS BESIDE WHITEY FORD, AND TWO BOYS OF TWO-AND-TWENTY WITH EIGHT HITS APIECE

The ledger of this championship will be consulted for decades, so the Herald sets down its principal entries now. The 57 seasons Milwaukee waited for a first title are the fourth-longest such vigil ever kept — the Phillies waited 77, the Browns-turned-Orioles 63, the Senators-turned-Rangers 62.5 The pitching carried it: Milwaukee's relief corps worked 65 of the staff's 118 October innings and answered with a 1.38 earned-run average and a .173 opponents' mark, each figure the second-stingiest any bullpen has posted in a postseason.5

Chief among those arms stands Aaron Ashby, whose spotless streak these columns have followed since he passed Gossage a week ago Sunday. The final accounting: 18 innings this October, every one scoreless, tying Whitey Ford's 1960 for the third-most all-scoreless innings in any single postseason, behind only Christy Mathewson's 27 of 1905 and Kenny Rogers' 23 of 2006 — and no other pitcher in playoff history has recorded five or more outs in seven consecutive scoreless appearances. He permitted five hits all month, walked three, struck out twenty, and watched the final out from the bullpen with a ball in his glove, ready for an inning that never came.57 The youth movement wrote its own pages: Chourio and Pratt, each 22, became the first teammates so young to collect eight hits apiece in the same postseason series; Chourio's 11 hits in the five games trail only Pepper Martin's 12 of 1931 through a Series' first five; and Pratt's seven runs batted in tied Gil McDougald's 1951 mark for a rookie, his final line reading .421 with two doubles, a home run, and one ovation from Robin Yount.56

THE CIVIC DESK: MILWAUKEE DECLARES FRIDAY A DAY OF PROCESSION — THE PARADE OF CHAMPIONS STEPS OFF AT TEN O'CLOCK FROM FOURTH AND WISCONSIN, WITH A RALLY AT THE LAKEFRONT AND A SHOWING OF "UECK" TO FOLLOW

The trophy travels north, and the city has fixed the hour of its welcome. The Brewers' Parade of Champions steps off Friday at 10 o'clock in the morning, Central time, from North 4th Street and West Wisconsin Avenue in downtown Milwaukee, concluding with a rally and fan festival at Henry Maier Festival Park on the lakefront. Admission asks nothing but promptness: the whole affair is free and open to the public, first come, first served.8

The rally's program carries one entry that will wet more eyes than the champagne did: alongside the alumni, the live music and a commemorative rally towel, the club will offer a special showing of Ueck, the documentary on the late Bob Uecker, fifty years the voice of this franchise, who died in January of 2025 with the drought still standing. The parade he never got to call now rolls, in part, for him.8

THE REQUIEM DESK: THREE JOURNEYS TO THE WORLD'S SERIES AND THREE EMPTY-HANDED RETURNS — THE RAYS, PICKED LAST IN THEIR DIVISION IN THE SPRING, LEAVE THE FIELD IN TEARS AND IN CREDIT BOTH

The visiting clubhouse's joy had its mirror down the corridor. Tampa Bay, picked by the wise men of the spring to finish last in its own division, instead spent most of the summer with the American League's best record, took the East from the Yankees in their own ballpark, swept those same Yankees out of October, and won the pennant under a roof that a hurricane had torn off two years before — and then met a better club. It is the franchise's third World's Series and its third defeat, after 2008 and 2020, and the Rays remain one of four clubs never to win the last game of a season, alongside the Padres, Mariners and Rockies — a list the Brewers departed Wednesday night.9

"I'm crushed right now, disappointed," said the manager Kevin Cash. "But it's easier to handle because of what we all meant to each other throughout the course of this season." Junior Caminero, true to the vow this paper printed yesterday, played on his wounded foot and singled once. Jonathan Aranda, the longest-tenured man in the organization, stood before his locker more than an hour after the final out, still in full uniform, the Series patch on his shoulder, while his teammates dressed and went home around him. The last word belongs to Drew Rasmussen, who started the clincher on short rest and lost it: "You just don't know how many opportunities you're going to get, especially in this game. So, to be this close, it really hurts."9

So ends the 2026 baseball year: 113 editions of this paper from the first pitch of spring to the last out of October, and the final score of the final game reads Brewers 4, Rays 1. The schedule ledger has been consulted this morning as it is every morning, and it stands empty — no contest today, none tomorrow, none until Opening Night brings the game back on March 24 of 2027, with the full card following a day later.2 What remains is ceremony and ledger-keeping: the parade up Wisconsin Avenue on Friday morning,8 and then the long winter of awards, auctions and argument, through which the Herald will publish as faithfully as ever. One image to carry into it: through this whole season, the Brewers' clubhouse manager Tony Migliaccio, a batboy with the club in 1978, kept in his pocket a coin struck by Judy Uecker after her husband's death — Bob's face on one side, and on the other his final sign-off on the Brewers' radio wire: So long, everybody!3 The old announcer's team are champions of the world, and this paper can think of no better words to close an October on. Until the morrow's dispatch, keep your scorecards near and your enthusiasms nearer.

~ THE HERALD ~

The Herald Acknowledges Its Debts

  1. MLB Box Scores — Thursday, October 29, 2026 — Boxscore
  2. Baseball-Reference.com — Upcoming Schedule and Upcoming Dates — Baseball-Reference
  3. Adam McCalvy, Believe it, Milwaukee! Brewers are World Series champs for 1st time — MLB.com
  4. Anthony Castrovince, Contreras honored with World Series MVP for prowess behind the plate — MLB.com
  5. Sarah Langs, A closer look at just how dominant the Brewers were this October — MLB.com
  6. Anthony DiComo, 'How awesome is this?' Pratt sets World Series rookie record to help Crew to 1st title — MLB.com
  7. Bryan Hoch, One of the best postseason performances ever? Ashby just did it — MLB.com
  8. Manny Randhawa, Party in Milwaukee! Brewers' parade set for Friday — MLB.com
  9. Adam Berry, After dream season, Rays' World Series wishes crash back down to earth — MLB.com