The low-budget Brewers won the World Series – and exposed baseball’s biggest lie

The low-budget Brewers won the World Series – and exposed baseball’s biggest lie | Howard Bryant - 玩加赛事

Milwaukee’s first World Series championship is a rebuke to baseball’s oligarch class, whose insistence that small-market teams cannot compete has been laid bare as fiction

For the entirety of the 2026 baseball season, the overlords of the game have stood on the single position that what has now happened could not happen, and the result was a year that has been treated like an appetizer for the main course of the offseason: the shutting down of the game until the players, after 40 years of resistance, finally agree to a salary cap. The insistence that the game had been predetermined undermined the Milwaukee Brewers, who spent 149 days this season atop the standings.

Baseball dismissed Milwaukee’s 22-0 demolition of Seattle on 18 August, the 20-0 waxing of Cincinnati a month later, and the comprehensive dusting of their division – their fourth consecutive National League Central title and fifth in six years – by 14 games. Baseball’s owners, at their persuasive best, would have their paying customers believe that the Brewers’ franchise-record 103 regular-season wins also were an illusion, or worse, the dreaded outlier, even though Milwaukee have won 770 games since 2018, the fourth-most in all of baseball. Even when Milwaukee exhaled and made the Dodgers look old in a stirring four-game sweep, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported the owners’ position remained unchanged.