Five MLB franchises have never won a World Series. In 10 days, or less, there will be only four on that list.
Sorry, then, to the Mariners, Padres and Rockies, who are going to have to wait until 2027 to have a chance to get their first Commissioner’s Trophy, but this year, either the Milwaukee Brewers or the Tampa Bay Rays are finally going to break through. This is the first World Series featuring two teams that have never won a World Series since 1980, when the Phillies beat the Royals.
Someone is going to scale the mountaintop, at long last. No matter which team does it, it’s going to be a mammoth, historical achievement. Here’s a look at both the Brewers and the Rays throughout the years: How they got here, where they’ve come from and what a championship would mean.
BREWERS
Franchise history: The Brewers got off to a bit of a rough start, back before they were the Brewers at all. They were established in 1969 as the Seattle Pilots, but the team’s owner, a former Minor League pitcher named Dewey Soriano, ran out of financing by the end of the team’s first season and had to declare bankruptcy. (That team is mostly immortalized in Jim Bouton’s Ball Four.)
A man named Bud Selig — he would end up hanging around baseball a while — bought the team in bankruptcy court and moved them to his hometown of Milwaukee, where they became the Brewers. While they would remain in Milwaukee, their journey wasn’t over. They played in the American League West for two more seasons, losing 90-plus games both times, before switching to the AL East, where they played for 21 seasons. The franchise then shifted to the AL Central when MLB went to six divisions in 1994 but stayed there for only four seasons until moving to the NL Central in 1998 — the year MLB expanded to include the Rays.
The divisions changed but success remained hard to come by. The franchise wouldn’t have its first winning season until 1978 and wouldn’t play in its first playoff game until 1981. Through 2017, the Brewers had been to the playoffs just four times.
World Series history: Prior to this year, 1982 was the only year the Brewers reached the World Series, but it was a glorious one. That team of Harvey’s Wallbangers — named after manager Harvey Kuenn, who took over after Buck Rodgers was fired 47 games into the season — was loaded, with future Hall of Famers Robin Yount, Paul Molitor, Rollie Fingers and Ted Simmons. They beat the Angels in a best-of-five ALCS, coming back after losing the first two. In the World Series, the Brewers took a 3-2 lead with a Game 5 win at County Stadium (in a game where Yount went 4-for-4), but the Cardinals won Games 6 and 7 at Busch Stadium.
The Brewers haven’t been as close to a title since, but they did reach the NLCS in 2011, ’18 and ’25. That 2018 series, in particular, has always chafed, as the Brewers pushed the Dodgers to a Game 7, in Milwaukee, and took the lead in the first inning before falling, 5-1.
Why this could be the year: This is, unquestionably, the best era in Brewers history, with eight postseason trips since 2018. This Brewers team set a franchise record with 103 wins, breaking their previous record (97), set all the way back in 2025, and captured their fourth consecutive division title and their fifth of the last six years.
This season has been the culmination of what the Brewers have been working toward for years. They have a deep and versatile roster that plays terrific defense, runs the bases smartly, is loaded with pitching and keeps peppering in young future stars. (And MLB Pipeline’s No. 1 prospect, Jesús Made, isn’t even here yet.) But now they have something new: The hands-down obvious best pitcher in baseball in Jacob Misiorowski, who is about to become the fourth Brewer to win a Cy Young Award and may throw a fastball harder than anyone who has ever lived.
The Brewers have long had one of the most loyal, dedicated fanbases in baseball, one that regularly brought in 2 million fans a year back when they were finishing at the bottom of the NL Central every year. This is the team of Bernie Brewer, and Roll Out the Barrel and the great Bob Uecker, who died just 21 months ago. Brewers fans have been waiting their entire lives for a World Series title. It would mean everything for them to get one.
RAYS
Franchise history: The Tampa Bay/St. Petersburg area had been trying to lure a team for more than a quarter-century, even building Tropicana Field — then known as the Florida Suncoast Dome and, later, the ThunderDome — in 1990, eight years before the Rays played their first game. The team debuted in 1998; future Hall of Famer (and Florida native) Wade Boggs hit the team’s first homer. Whatever excitement the franchise brought was tempered by a whole bunch of losing: The team, then known as the Devil Rays, had a losing record in each of its first 10 seasons, only once reaching 70 wins and avoiding last place in the AL East. In 2008, they changed their name to the Rays, and just like that, they not only had their first winning season, at 97-65, and won their first division title … they reached their first World Series.
World Series history: In 2008, they only got one win — a Game 2 victory from James Shields; David Price closed out that game — in a five-game series loss to the Phillies. It’s fair if you can’t immediately recall the other World Series: That one came in 2020, when there was a lot going on. That team got two games off the Dodgers, and the series was in fact tied after four games, thanks to a dramatic, walk-off two-run single from Brett Phillips (albeit in front of a reduced-capacity crowd, in Texas). Thus, Game 3 against the Brewers will be the first World Series game at the Trop in 18 years and just the third ever.
Why this could be the year: The Rays were picked by most — including, uh, your author— to finish last in the AL East this year, but that doesn’t mean everyone thought they would be terrible: It says more about how stacked that division was thought to be. The Rays had six straight winning seasons from 2018-2023 before having two losing seasons heading into this one, thus tempering expectations for this year.
But the Rays have been fantastic from the get-go, getting an MVP-caliber season from Junior Caminero, ace-level pitching from Drew Rasmussen and, down the stretch, from Trade Deadline acquisition and ALCS MVP Freddy Peralta. They also have a deep bullpen, led by dominant closer Bryan Baker.
The Rays have very much outpunched their payroll weight for two decades now, something that’s particularly impressive considering the division they play in and the heavyweights in it. That’s largely because of a front-office pipeline that has seeded teams throughout the rest of baseball, from the Cardinals’ Chaim Bloom to the Marlins’ Peter Bendix to, as it turns out, the leaders of the two teams who have been ruling the National League: the Dodgers’ Andrew Friedman and the Brewers’ Matt Arnold, facing his former team in the World Series. (The A’s even hired a former Rays exec to be their president of baseball operations job just this week.) The Rays have had one of the vanguard front offices for two decades, but that World Series ring has proven elusive. Current Rays POBO Erik Neander has a chance to be the guy who finally gets one.
It would be extra special for the Rays to do it the year they were able to return to the Trop, the only home they’ve ever known, after a year of repairs in the wake of Hurricane Milton. It’s a lovelier park than it’s given credit for, and it’s never looked lovelier than it will right now … all gussied up for the Fall Classic.