The 2026 season has finally come to a close, and for the first time in their nearly six years of existence, the Milwaukee Brewers are World Series champions! It’s been an impressive run, one of the best we’ve seen in recent memory, and now all that’s left is for me to close out the season in my traditional way, with a new Sporcle quiz.
And thus, we have The 2026 Edition of the Best Active Players Without a World Series Quiz! Now’s your chance to play it unspoiled; I’ll start discussing the results and a bunch of interesting tidbits a little after the jump and subscription plug. But before then, if you haven’t tried it yet, now’s also a good time to try my other new quiz, World Series with Two Expansion Teams, which was also just named a Curator’s Pick over on Sporcle!
(Also, if you’d like even more trivia for later, I also have playlists of my other past World Series quizzes!)
Okay, now that that’s all out of the way, congrats to the three players who got their names removed at the last minute, Christian Yelich, Brandon Woodruff, and Brice Turang! Yelich has been towards the top of the list for years now, and would have placed thirteenth here. It was also nice to see Woodruff work his way back onto the field and close out Game 3 after not playing since July due to injuries; it’s always rough when the longtime vets can’t actually make it to the big moments. And Turang was a late add; I usually need to compile the lists a little bit before the end of the season because it’s a little too much work to do on the one day in between the regular and postseason, and then I update the final tallies later during the playoffs themselves. But according to Baseball-Reference, Turang’s end of the season pushed his career WAR above the 19.0 cutoff that I was using. That saved me the issue of having to include a player who explicitly wasn’t part of my preview.*
*Also, in a bit of a late discovery (possibly because the team was embargoing the news until the end of the playoffs?), the team apparently just missed getting a fourth in Tarik Skubal; the Tigers apparently nixed a deal they had in place with the Brewers at the last minute without telling them, only to send Skubal to the Dodgers instead. It’s wild to imagine a team this good with yet another ace in October.
The Brewers’s first title was a dominant run, with the team leading the majors in wins at 103 and then riding an 11-2 hot streak to the championship. This makes Milwaukee just the ninth team in the Wild Card era to win a World Series after leading the majors in wins. And they were just a few Game 4 errors away from becoming the first team (since the switch to best-of-sevens in the LCS) to sweep both the League Championship Series and the World Series back-to-back. (Interestingly, 3 LCS sweepers have gone on to get swept themselves in the Fall Classic: the 2012 Tigers, the 2007 Rockies, and the 1990 A’s).
The win closes out the (co-)second longest World Series drought (tied with San Diego), coming in the team’s 58th season after their addition to the league back in 1969. It also came on the Brewers’ first ever NL Pennant, and just second Pennant in franchise history (since they were still in the AL the last time they made it, back in 1982). And it’s the city of Milwaukee’s second World Series victory ever, with the first coming back in 1957 thanks to the Pre-Atlanta Braves.
The match-up against Tampa made for interesting drama in its own right, with this being the first pairing of titleless teams in the World Series since the 1980 match-up between the Phillies and Royals. It’s probably going to be a while before we get another one of those (although maybe a future expansion will make things a little more likely? This is the longest baseball has gone without adding new teams since the initial pre-Expansion era). I also mentioned last time that this was only the fourth all-expansion team World Series ever, after 2015 (Royals-Mets), 2019 (Nationals-Astros), and 2023 (Rangers-Diamondbacks). With the loss, the Rays fall to 0-3 all-time in the World Series; a rough start, but at least they still have a long way to go to challenge for that title (I believe that honor belongs to the Dodgers, who took eight pennants before their eventual first win back in 1955).
It’s also kind of wild to think about the Brewers’ drought in the wider context of the last few years. Ending the second longest active World Series drought is a pretty historic feat, especially given that it was also the franchise’s first title in their multiple decades of existence. I feel like I didn’t pay attention to that aspect of things in my Playoff Trivia preview, but that was in large part because the rest of the field wasn’t in much of a playoff drought, making it less appealing to spend time on.
Yet somehow, the few teams with historic droughts wound up coming up big this October. The Brewers obviously won it all, the Rays met them in the search for their first title, the Guardians made it to the ALCS, the Padres were arguably the only team that even threatened the Brewers’ run back in the NLDS… Those four teams were basically everyone in the playoffs with any extended dry streak.
It’s been kind of a larger trend in MLB over the last decade, too. The Brewers are the fifth team in the last ten years to break a 50-year World Series drought or longer, which is kind of remarkable considering that span has also seen titles go to the Red Sox, Braves, and three times to the Dodgers. But the Cubs famously broke the Curse back in 2016, and in the years since, we’ve seen the Astros (2017), Nationals (2019), Rangers (2023), and now Brewers all break titleless streaks of five decades or longer. Those last four of course were also the first titles for four of the eight original expansion teams, a group that had largely been rather luckless, historically speaking.
This has been a pretty radical re-shaping of the Longest Droughts leaderboard, arguably even greater than we saw back in the 2000s when the Angels, Giants, and both Sox teams all closed out their runs. Cleveland is still at the top, coming up on eight decades (and falling tantalizingly close once again), and the Padres remain the only ‘60s expansion team still seeking their first title. But even the latter feels like a bit of a reversal of fates, given their recent history; this was not a team that reached the postseason generally, but the team now has as many playoff appearances in the Manny Machado/Fernando Tatis Jr. era as it had in the five decades preceding it.
After them, what’s at the top now? Well, the Mariners (a 1977 expansion team, alongside the Blue Jays) finally crossed the 50-season mark this year, and are still seeking even a pennant. The Pirates (last World Series in 1979) and Orioles (1983) are coming up on that mark, too. The Tigers (1984) and Mets (1986) just passed 40 years. We have another fives teams in the 30-40 year range, which is rough… but considering we have a 30-team league now, it doesn’t quite feel like it’s worth calling out as historically bad just yet (and we’ll see what happens if an expansion is around the corner; now that the A’s and Rays seem to have their stadium situation sorted, seemed to be the next thing the league deals with). My yearly “longest drought” stat feels like it’s going to be reaching a long set of lulls here for the next few years (especially since every one of these teams outside of the Guardians and Padres kind of feels like they badly need to get their houses in order, and might not be regular playoff features just yet…).
What else is there to cover… the Brewers were a fairly young team this year, so nobody joined the exclusive club of Winning the World Series with Three Different Teams.* We did have a couple do it with their second, though. World Series MVP William Contreras is the most notable, following his win with the Braves in 2021. He’s still young and a star, and since he’s a free agent after next year, he could have many more tries to add his name to that list, depending on whether Milwaukee can lock him up long-term.
There’s also Dustin May (also on the 2020 Dodgers), who’s more likely to be hitting the market this offseason. If he starts signing one-year deals and becoming trade deadline bait (like he was this year), that may up his chances of being dealt to patch up a contender’s roster. And reliever Grant Anderson spent most of 2026 with the Brewers after doing the same with the Rangers in 2023, although he still didn’t actually appear on either’s postseason rosters. More pertinent to any crossover readers here from The Launch Angle, Lance McCuller Jr.’s 4.2 innings on the Brewers qualify him for his third World Series ring (after 2017 and 2022), although given his performance the last few years, I’m not sure he has much of a chance at picking up another one on a third team.
*On a related side note, this year officially ends our bizarre six-year streak of the Champion team having a Will Smith on the roster.
For more William Contreras trivia, he was also on Team Venezuela during their upset win back in the spring World Baseball Classic. Jackson Chourio and Antonio Senzatela (plus the injured Angel Zerpa) were also on both teams, meaning they join Alex Bregman and Luke Gregerson (2017 Team USA and Astros) as the only people so far to pull off that double feature in one year.
And with that, the 2026 season is in the books. It’s always so fun when a long-suffering team wins, not just because it’s an exciting new thing to end the year on, but because it brings out so many weird and fun bits of trivia like this, this was a really fun column to write this year! Of course, the offseason is hardly the end of things here; I’ll be writing a ton in the coming months to cover both the upcoming Hall of Fame elections and my normal Future Hall of Fame series. And if you’d like to be notified when those get published, you can join the Hot Corner Harbor mailing list using the text box below!
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