As of Sunday, October 25: Milwaukee leads the series 2-0. Game 3 is Monday, October 26, at 8 p.m. ET.
The Milwaukee Brewers lead the Tampa Bay Rays 2-0 in the Brewers Rays World Series after a 5-4 comeback win on Saturday night. Whoever finishes the job, baseball will crown a franchise that has never won a championship.
Both clubs are among the five active MLB franchises without a World Series title. The other three are the Padres, Mariners and Rockies; we checked that against MLB’s results database, which lists every Series winner since 1903. One of those droughts ends within a week. It ends for a team that spent a fraction of what the sport’s giants did.
Milwaukee came back again in Game 2
Tampa Bay scored four runs in the first inning at American Family Field. Liam Hicks capped it with a two-run homer, the first of the Series. The Brewers answered with two in the bottom half and then chipped away, MLB.com’s Anthony Castrovince reported.
A Jonathan Aranda error let a run score in the fourth. Sal Frelick tied it with a homer in the sixth, and Cooper Pratt singled home the winning run in the seventh.
Rays starter Drew Rasmussen lasted only 3⅔ innings. That stung, because Tampa Bay went 75-17 this season when it scored more than three runs, MLB.com’s Adam Berry noted. Aaron Ashby finished the game with the tying run on third.
“If we’re down,” Frelick said afterward, “we’re not out.” Milwaukee won Game 1, 3-2, behind Jacob Misiorowski’s record 103.5 mph opening pitch, which we broke down on Saturday.
History favours the Brewers now. Of the 57 teams to take a 2-0 World Series lead, 46 won the title. That is 80.7%, according to MLB.com’s Game 3 preview.
Two payrolls that add up to less than the Dodgers’
Neither team bought its way here. On opening day, Milwaukee’s payroll ranked 19th in MLB at $125.5 million. Tampa Bay’s ranked 26th at $89.6 million, according to USA Today’s list, which uses MLB labor relations figures. FanGraphs puts the Rays 28th, NBC News reported.
Run USA Today’s numbers and the gap is wide. The two clubs combined spent about $215.1 million. The Dodgers, whom Milwaukee swept in the NL Championship Series, spent $322.4 million alone. That is about $107 million more than both World Series teams together.
It is the first World Series since 1991 between two bottom-half payrolls, NBC reported, citing the Associated Press. The winner will be the first bottom-half spender to win it all since the 2015 Kansas City Royals.
That matters beyond two fan bases, because the labor deal ends after this season. In February, players’ union acting executive director Bruce Meyer said “a lockout is all but guaranteed,” NBC reported.
The league wants a salary cap, which it ties to competitive balance. Meyer told NBC this matchup shows that argument “holds no water.” A cap may still come, but this Series makes it harder to argue that only big spenders reach the final weekend. Labor questions are running through US sports this fall; in Dallas, the Cowboys just agreed to bargain with their cheerleaders’ new union.
How Milwaukee finally got its pennant
The Brewers won a franchise-record 103 games, the most in MLB this year, per the league standings. Then they swept the two-time defending champion Dodgers, ESPN’s Bradford Doolittle reported. No team had ever swept an opponent that swept it the year before.
It was also Milwaukee’s first National League pennant. The Brewers had been the only one of the league’s 15 clubs without one.
Their only other World Series came in 1982, when the club played in the American League and lost to the Cardinals in seven games. Fans “famously threw a parade for a World Series losing team” that year, MLB.com’s Adam McCalvy wrote. Friday’s win was the franchise’s first in a World Series game in 16,077 days.
Christian Yelich, the 2018 NL MVP and now team captain, has lived through much of that wait. He drove in the Series’ first run with a triple. “People coming up to you saying they’ve waited their whole life for this,” Yelich said, “it’s pretty cool.”
Market size makes the run stranger still. Milwaukee “is literally the smallest market in baseball for the time being,” CBS Sports’ Matt Snyder wrote in 2025. The Dodgers they swept were chasing a third straight title.
Tampa Bay’s road ran through a pitcher Milwaukee traded
The Rays went 98-64, the American League’s best record. They swept the Yankees in the Division Series. Then they beat Cleveland in six for the pennant, clinching 7-3 at Tropicana Field on October 19, ESPN reported.
The man who started that clincher is a Brewers story too.
Milwaukee traded Freddy Peralta to the Mets on January 21. The Mets sent him to Tampa Bay on August 2, MLB’s transaction log shows. NBC reported he was named ALCS MVP. He is 7-0 with a 0.89 ERA over his last 10 outings, per MLB.com.
This is the Rays’ third World Series. They lost to the Phillies in five games in 2008 and to the Dodgers in six in 2020. The Tampa Bay area is the 11th-largest US TV market, per Nielsen figures cited by NBC. So the Rays’ thrift is a spending choice, not a matter of size.
The ballpark has been the franchise’s other storyline. Hurricane Milton wrecked Tropicana Field’s roof in October 2024. The Rays played all of 2025 at the Yankees’ spring training park. They returned in April after roughly $60 million in repairs, Front Office Sports reported.
In August, Tampa’s city council voted 4-3 for a $2.36 billion ballpark in Tampa, MLB.com reported. Hillsborough County commissioners approved it 5-2 the next day, the county said. The Rays’ Tropicana Field agreement runs through 2028, and they are aiming for Opening Day 2029 in Tampa. A first title would arrive in a building the team plans to leave.
Game 3 is Monday night at the Trop
Game 3 starts at 8 p.m. ET on Monday, October 26, at Tropicana Field. It airs on FOX and FOX Deportes and streams on FOX One, according to MLB.com. It will be the first World Series game at the Trop since 2008.
Lefty Robert Gasser starts for Milwaukee. Peralta starts for Tampa Bay against the team he pitched for from 2018 until January.
Game 4 is Tuesday at the Trop, with Game 5 there on Wednesday if needed. Games 6 and 7 would be in Milwaukee on Friday, October 30, and Saturday, October 31. Every game starts at 8 p.m. ET, per the CBS Sports schedule.
The earliest Milwaukee can clinch is Tuesday night. That would mean celebrating its first title on the Rays’ field.