A dejected Matt Arnold, president of baseball operations for the Milwaukee Brewers, walked into an elevator at Dodger Stadium following Game 4 of the 2025 NLCS with an ashen face. It was as if he’d seen a horror movie. And for the organization trying to get over a then 43-year hump and its fan base, they did. As the Brewers were swept in embarrassing fashion by the eventual World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers, the reality that they had not yet arrived had set in.
A year later, the Brewers watched a different movie, a feel-good flick, unfold. This time, Milwaukee was the victor. Not only are the Brewers heading to the World Series for the first time since 1982, but they did so by dominating those same Dodgers who were boogeymen last fall, ending MLB’s third-longest World Series appearance drought.
“The series prior to playing the Dodgers last year took a lot out of us. I think Murph has talked about that a lot,” Arnold said of manager Pat Murphy last week. “Same thing with the Padres. That’s just part of it. So we’re going to have to be resilient here. I think this group is another level advanced from that. They’ve been through a lot.”
Taking down the Dodgers is significant in the Brewers’ story. Milwaukee became the first team in MLB history to sweep a team that swept them the previous year. And against the team that has struck dread for the past two seasons across baseball, the Brewers showed that this iteration of their team is not easily shaken.
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“I can’t speak for anybody else, but for me, watching the way they carried themselves on the field after sweeping us last year was a little bit eye-opening,” NLCS MVP Jake Bauers said. “We won the NLDS against the Cubs [in 2025], and I think we kind of celebrated like that was something.
“Those guys swept us, they sent us home, and you would have thought it was a handshake line at a spring training game. That’s something that I carried with me. That’s something that I remembered. Yeah, it was a little bit of motivation to just say, we’ve got to keep going until there’s not another game left to play.”
Jake Bauers earned NLCS MVP honors for his clutch hitting in Milwaukee’s sweep of Los Angeles.
(AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)
The Brewers defeating the back-to-back World Series champions shouldn’t be a surprise. While a sweep wasn’t on anyone’s radar, this Brewers team had shown for most of the season that it was one of baseball’s best. But the journey to end over four decades of disappointments, failures and heartbreak didn’t begin over the last two years.
Milwaukee’s climb to reaching the National League pennant has been slow and methodical over the last decade. The Brewers have become a model of consistency. They’ve become one of the best organizations in baseball as a result.
“There’s a lot of people that picked them to be 82 wins, 83 wins, and I think we’re at 110 and counting,” Murphy said following the Brewers’ NLCS sweep. “It just goes to show you the group that’s in the room. They bought into each other. They bought into team.”
The Brewers have reached the postseason in eight of the last nine seasons, including three trips to the NLCS. They’ve averaged 94 wins over the last eight full seasons (excluding shortened 2020 season) and the postseason’s No. 1 seed back-to-back years. So this trip to the Fall Classic has been a long time coming.
Milwaukee has been a prime example of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. That includes its roster, to management.
The first time the Dodgers faced the Brewers in the NLCS in 2018, the organization looked completely different. They were led by David Stearns, the current New York Mets president of baseball operations, with manager Craig Counsell, now with the rival Chicago Cubs, on the top step of Milwaukee’s dugout. After Stearns’ departure in 2022 and Counsell’s in 2023, there was thought that Milwaukee’s run of success might end.
History will show it was only a blip on the franchise’s radar, as the partnership of Arnold and Murphy has helped take the organization to another level.
Coming into October, the Brewers finished the season second in runs scored, but after also finishing 28th in homers, many wondered if their offensive success could continue in the postseason. Ironically in these playoffs, Milwaukee leads all teams in homers, slugging percentage and OPS, showing its offense is as good as any.
“You can’t win this game by yourself,” second baseman Brice Turang said. “You got to trust in your teammates to get it done. And if that’s moving a guy over, then you move the guy over. And sometimes in trying to move them over, you drive a ball in the gap, and you end up scoring them. So you end up doing yourself a favor, so I think when you play that way, good things happen.”
The story of the 2026 Milwaukee Brewers is not yet finished as they host Games 1 and 2 of the Fall Classic next week. This team isn’t a Cinderella story. The Brewers are an NL behemoth that has been building toward this success for quite some time.
And four wins away from their ultimate goal and a roster that is one of the youngest in the sport, this might be just their beginning.