The Brewers are going to win this thing. They lead the World Series three games to none and just hung a 10-1 beating on the Rays in Game 3. Game 4 is Tuesday night at Tropicana Field, and the only thing standing between Milwaukee and the first championship in franchise history is one win they look fully capable of taking whenever they want it.
Nothing is clinched yet. Game 4 hasn't been played, and the Brewers become champions the moment they record the final out. If you want to hold off on the parade, that's the correct and boring thing to do.
It's over anyway, in every way that actually predicts a baseball game, even if it isn't official yet. Only one team in 43 previous best-of-seven postseason series has ever climbed out of a 3-0 hole, and no team has done it in a World Series. The Rays need a miracle now, and miracles rarely show up for a team that just got outhit 16 to 3 and didn't get its second hit until the ninth inning.
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What makes this Milwaukee team believable is that Game 3 came without a single home run. The Brewers built an eight-run inning out of seven straight hits with two outs, both of which went into the World Series record book, with every run in that inning scoring with two down. That's a lineup refusing to let an opponent breathe. Jackson Chourio went 4-for-5, William Contreras went 3-for-5, and Brice Turang chipped in two RBIs. They just keep coming up and down the order, with no obvious place to catch your breath.
They're doing it on both sides of the ball, too. Rookie lefty Robert Gasser threw one-hit ball and faced the minimum through six innings. Milwaukee has now won eight straight postseason games, matching a postseason record, and sits on the edge of becoming the first team to sweep both the League Championship Series and the World Series since the LCS went to a best-of-seven format in 1975. They've been the best team on the field every night.
The cruelest subplot belongs to Freddy Peralta. He pitched for the Brewers for years before Tampa Bay traded for him and reworked his delivery, and plenty of ink got spilled over how the Rays had "fixed" him. Maybe they did tidy up the mechanics. Game 3 said otherwise: his old team tagged him for five earned runs and chased him before he finished the fifth. Whatever Tampa unlocked didn't survive contact with the lineup that knows him best. If his turnaround was thinner than the story made it sound, Milwaukee just proved it.
The only case for the Rays is the one nobody in the room believes: that this is still a series because three isn't four. Tampa Bay has been in the World Series before, in 2008 and 2020, and is chasing its first title. None of that helps against a team squeezing the life out of every inning. Their bullpen imploded in the decisive inning, and their defense had a night it'd like back. A better team is beating them, plain and simple.
Book the flight if you're from Milwaukee. The Brewers have waited since 1982 to get back here and have never won it all. One more win changes that, and they are not going to need any help getting it.
