Brewers vs. Rays World Series: A First-Time Champion Is Guaranteed

Milwaukee hasn’t hosted a World Series game since October 1982. That ends Friday night. The Brewers open the 122nd Fall Classic against the Tampa Bay Rays at American Family Field, a series guaranteed, whatever else the next week brings, to end with a first-time champion, one way or the other, before the month is out.

Neither club has ever won it; one of them is about to.

The Brewers arrive with the best record in baseball, 103-59. They didn’t tiptoe in. Milwaukee swept the Los Angeles Dodgers, the defending back-to-back champions, in the National League Championship Series. It’s the franchise’s first pennant since 1982, when the club was still an American League team and lost to St. Louis in seven games, and its first since joining the NL in 1998. Manager Pat Murphy has had over a week to set his pitching.

Tampa Bay’s road ran later. And longer. The Rays, the American League’s top seed at 98-64, needed six games to finish Cleveland, closing the ALCS with a 7-3 win on Monday night. Freddy Peralta gave them 5.1 innings of one-run ball. Two-run homers from Junior Caminero in the seventh and Yandy Diaz in the eighth settled it. Tampa Bay’s third pennant. The first two ended in losses, to Philadelphia in 2008 and to the Dodgers in 2020, in a Series played entirely at a neutral site in Texas.

Beaten in four straight, the richest roster in baseball is home. The two teams still playing are the ones known for the slower method: draft well, develop what you draft, trade players before they get expensive and start again. Tampa Bay went a decade without a winning season, then reached the playoffs 10 times in the 19 seasons after 2008. Milwaukee built a 103-win team the same way. Between them, the two clubs won 201 regular-season games, the best record in each league. Milwaukee, meanwhile, hasn’t played in more than a week.

Long layoffs have a way of showing up in a lineup’s first two trips through the order, and Tampa Bay, with three days, gets just enough time to reset its bullpen without scrambling the rotation. The starting lineups weren’t announced a day out. Weather won’t matter. American Family Field has a retractable roof. Tropicana Field is domed. So no game in this Series can be delayed by rain. It’s also the first postseason meeting between the two franchises.

Every game starts at 8 p.m. ET on FOX and FOX Deportes, streaming on FOX One. Games 1 and 2 are in Milwaukee on Friday and Saturday, Games 3 through 5 in St. Petersburg from Monday to Wednesday, and Games 6 and 7, if needed, back in Milwaukee on Oct. 30 and 31, with the Brewers holding home-field advantage in the 2-3-2 format. The secondary market has priced Milwaukee’s wait: the cheapest Game 1 listings were above $3,200, standing room only, nearly four times the get-in price for Game 3 at Tropicana Field.

If the series goes the distance, a first-time champion will be crowned in Milwaukee on Oct. 31, and baseball’s list of franchises that have never won one shrinks from five to four.