One of the longest waits in American sports ended with a soft ground ball to second base. The Milwaukee Brewers beat the Tampa Bay Rays 4-1 in Game 5 of the World Series on Wednesday night at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Florida, taking the series four games to one and winning a championship for the first time in the franchise’s 58 seasons. With the win, Milwaukee comes off the list of clubs that had never won a World Series, a list the Rays remain on.
The franchise began as the Seattle Pilots in 1969 and moved to Milwaukee a year later. It had reached the World Series only once before, in 1982, when the hard-hitting club known as Harvey’s Wallbangers lost to the St. Louis Cardinals in seven games. For 44 years, that near miss stood as the high-water mark. This team, the best in baseball all season, finally went one step further.
Jacob Misiorowski, who also won Game 1, held Tampa Bay scoreless for 5 2/3 innings before a right calf cramp ended his night in the sixth with a 4-0 lead. The runs came in the small pieces detailed by USA Today: a Cooper Pratt run-scoring single in the second inning, a David Hamilton RBI single in the fifth, and a sixth inning built on a William Contreras RBI double and a Pratt sacrifice fly. Tampa Bay’s only run came in the ninth, and Trevor Megill recorded the final out, a ground ball from Palacios to second baseman Brice Turang, who threw to Jake Bauers at first.
Contreras was named the World Series MVP after hitting .381 with four RBIs and a franchise-record 19 postseason hits. The title capped the sport’s defining underdog story of the year: 103 regular-season wins, a sweep of the two-time defending champion Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League Championship Series, and an 11-2 postseason, all from baseball’s smallest market, on a $144 million payroll that the Dodgers’ more than doubled.
The clincher came one night after the kind of loss that once defined the franchise. In Game 4, Pratt’s solo home run in the top of the 12th inning put Milwaukee three outs from the championship, only for Tampa Bay to rally in the bottom of the inning for its only win of the series. Twenty-four hours later, there was no rally left.
Yet the name that hung over the celebration belonged to a man who was not there. Bob Uecker was the Brewers’ radio voice for 54 years, from 1971 until his death on January 16, 2025, at 90, after a private battle with small-cell lung cancer. To the country beyond Milwaukee, he was “Mr. Baseball,” the nickname Johnny Carson gave him, a fixture of The Tonight Show and the Miller Lite commercials, and the voice of broadcaster Harry Doyle in the film Major League. In Milwaukee, he was simply the sound of summer. The one thing missing from his record was the one thing he wanted most: Uecker never got to call his team a champion.
The Brewers carried him through October anyway. During the Stand Up To Cancer moment in Game 4, every Milwaukee player held up a placard bearing the same word: “UECK.” When Pratt hit his 12th-inning home run that night, FOX play-by-play announcer Joe Davis worked a tribute to Uecker into the call. Before Game 5, fans left beer cans at the Uecker statue.
After the final out, FOX Sports reporter Ken Rosenthal asked captain Christian Yelich what Uecker would have been thinking. “He’s smiling, man. He’s smiling,” Yelich said. “I really wish he could have been here to see this. It would have meant everything to him.” Then he made the dedication plain: “We keep him close to our hearts. And this one’s still for Bob and still for Ueck. Ueck, I love you, man. And we did it.” Manager Pat Murphy added, “I know the man Ueck upstairs is looking down,” and former Brewer CC Sabathia posted the same thought on X: “Bob Uecker smiling down.”
Watching in Florida was Robin Yount, the Hall of Famer whose only career regret was never winning a World Series with Milwaukee, alongside fellow franchise greats Paul Molitor, Ryan Braun and Prince Fielder. That regret is retired now, too.
The championship celebration is set for Friday in Milwaukee: a parade beginning at 10 a.m. at North 4th Street and West Wisconsin Avenue, through downtown to Henry Maier Festival Park, where a rally and fan festival will follow. The grounds open at 8 a.m., with free admission until capacity is reached. Tickets for the rally speeches inside the American Family Insurance Amphitheater go on sale Thursday, the public sale at 2 p.m., with net proceeds benefiting the Brewers Community Foundation; the speeches will also play on video boards around the grounds, and the first 50,000 fans at the rally receive a limited-edition championship rally towel. Officials expect a crowd of at least 400,000. FOX6 will broadcast the parade for viewers watching from home.