The Brewers Were 35-1 on Opening Day With Baseball's Best Record Behind Them. They Won, and the Market Still Makes Them 10 Percent
Milwaukee beat Tampa Bay 4-1 in Game 5 on Wednesday for the first title in the franchise's 57 seasons. A 103-59 team that outscored opponents by 214 runs, with the 19th-highest payroll, was priced like a fringe contender in March. The 2027 futures board already has the Dodgers at two and a half times their price. Some of that is fair. Not all of it.
October 29, 2026 at 5:36 PM EDT
4 min read
The last out was a slow roller. Trevor Megill got Richie Palacios to tap one to second, Brice Turang fielded it, and at Tropicana Field on Wednesday night the Milwaukee Brewers won their first World Series, 4-1 in Game 5, four games to one. The franchise has played 57 seasons. Until Wednesday its only other World Series had been in 1982.
The game itself was quiet in the way that Milwaukee's season was. Cooper Pratt singled in a run off Drew Rasmussen in the second, singled and scored in the fifth, and hit a sacrifice fly in the sixth after a William Contreras double. Jacob Misiorowski, whom Pat Murphy had saved instead of using him in the 12th inning of Game 4, gave up nothing for 5 2/3 innings before a right calf cramp took him out. The Rays scored once, in the ninth.
"We were relentless," Murphy said. Contreras, the Series MVP, went further: "I feel like I'm the best catcher in the league." He finished with an .863 OPS, threw out three runners, won 10 of 13 challenges under the automated strike zone, and caught a staff that held Tampa Bay to a .182 average. Aaron Ashby finished the postseason with 18 straight scoreless innings, which ESPN says is a single-postseason record for a reliever.
What the market thought in March
On Opening Day, March 25, DraftKings had Milwaukee at +3500 to win the World Series, according to Fox Sports. That implies a little under 3%. This was a team coming off the most regular-season wins in baseball. It then won 103 games again, a franchise record and the majors' best for a second straight year, and outscored its opponents by 214 runs, 832 to 618. By the start of the playoffs the price was +550. By Game 1 the Brewers were -165 to win the series. They went 11-2 through October, beating the Padres and then the two-time defending champion Dodgers.
There is a simple reason a team like that opens at 35-1. ESPN notes it had the 19th-highest payroll in the sport. The market treats a low-payroll team's good season as something that will regress and a high-payroll team's good season as the expected result. Two seasons in a row, Milwaukee was the best team in baseball and was priced as though it were a pleasant surprise.
We said on October 20 that the series price was too kind to Tampa Bay, using the same run differentials. One series is one result, and it proves nothing about anyone's judgment, ours included. The broader point does not depend on it.
The board already repeats it
On Thursday morning, Polymarket's 2027 World Series market, as listed by Covers, had the Dodgers at 25% and the champions at 10%. The Braves were at 9%, the Yankees at 7%.
A 10% price is not an insult. It makes Milwaukee the clear second choice. But it means the market thinks the Dodgers, whom the Brewers just beat in the NLCS, are two and a half times as likely to win next year as the team that has had baseball's best record for two years running. That gap is the same bet the market made in March: that payroll keeps winning in the long run, and Milwaukee's results are a streak.
The best case for the market
The strongest argument for the price goes like this. October is mostly noise. The 2025 Brewers also had the majors' best record and were swept by the Dodgers in the NLCS. This year's title hinged partly on a 12-inning Game 4 the Rays won on an error and a pinch-hit single, and a short series between good teams is close to a coin flip. A futures price is not a power ranking. It has to account for 12 playoff teams, for injuries, and for the fact that a cheap roster gets more expensive. Jake Bauers, who caught the final out, is about to be a free agent. The Dodgers' payroll buys replacements in July that Milwaukee cannot buy. In that light, 25% against 10% is simply what money buys over 162 games plus a bracket, and the March 35-1 reflected genuine doubt about whether the 2025 team was real.
Most of that is right, and it is the reason we are not calling the 2027 price a mistake outright. Payroll does buy depth, and depth does matter more over a season than talent does in a week. Our objection is to the March number, not this one. A team coming off the best record in baseball should not be priced in the same range as a team that needs things to go right just to reach the playoffs. 35-1 said Milwaukee's 2025 was a fluke. 2026 answered that with 103 more wins and the title.
What would prove us wrong: if the Brewers fall back to the mid-80s next year, the regression view wins and the market was right to doubt them. If they win 95 or more and the price still opens behind two or three bigger payrolls, the bias is in the price, not in the team.
The parade is Friday at 10 a.m. CT, from N. 4th Street and W. Wisconsin Avenue to the Summerfest grounds. "It's better than you think it would be," Christian Yelich said. In Milwaukee, that is the first time anyone has been able to say it.