The Brewers have now played nine games in the last 26 days and they've won eight of them

Oct 24, 2026 at 12:18 am ET • 6 min read

MILWAUKEE -- The Milwaukee Brewers won Game 1 of the World Series, 3-2, Friday night at American Family Field. It was their first win since Thursday, Oct. 15. They hadn't lost since then either, though; they had been off. 

Any time a team has a long layoff in the postseason, we end up hearing the same tired song and dance. "Rust vs. Rest" is the succinct headline. The basic argument is that with baseball being a daily sport in the regular season, teams sitting around for multiple days between series -- or between the end of the regular season and the divisional series -- are at some sort of disadvantage because they'll come out rusty. 

It's nonsense, of course. 

One example obviously doesn't disprove a theory -- though we have several more and we'll get to those -- but the Brewers are doing their best to kill that narrative.

In the first inning of World Series Game 1 on Friday, Jackson Chourio led off with a single. Christian Yelich tripled him home and then scored on a William Contreras single. In the span of four batters, the team that spent seven full days without playing a game just scored two runs. Nick Martinez, on the mound for the Rays, wasn't great in the second half, but he was an All-Star this season and was coming off an outing in which he allowed only one run in more than five innings against the Guardians in the ALCS.

Was Contreras rusty? After that RBI single in the first, he threw out two runners trying to steal and nailed both of his ABS challenges. It sure seems like a rusty catcher wouldn't be so excellent behind the plate at judging balls and strikes. 

"Contreras was unbelievable," Brewers manager Pat Murphy said after the game. "The two caught stealings, the ABS, the hits, calling the game.

" ... Now, we did not play great. You can look back and we made a baserunning mistake, we made an execution mistake. We made a defensive mistake. We weren't perfect. But after being off for some time, I'm pleased we came out in the first inning ready to go."

The wait between sweeping the Dodgers in the NLDS and Game 1 of the World Series wasn't the Brewers' only break. They have now played just nine games in 26 days. They've won eight of them. It sort of blows up that "rusty" argument, doesn't it?

As all teams with long layoffs do, the Brewers had plenty of practices. These days, that's not just swings off batting practice pitchers; Trajekt technology uses holograms of real pitchers and recreates everything about their pitches, including spin rate, velocity, movement, the works. The tech has gotten so good that players have started bypassing minor-league rehab assignments after injury absences and instead just getting back up to game speed using the Trajekt machines.

The Brewers also played practice games. 

"We played baseball, that's how we prepared," Murphy said on Thursday before their team workout. "We went out there and played baseball every day, live at-bats. You can't recreate real, you know what I mean? It's a long layoff, and if we want to use it as an excuse, then let people use it as an excuse, but I refuse to do that."

I'm glad he said something about excuses, because some of the narratives we've seen used with teams after layoffs in the past are tantamount to excuse-making. When high-seeded teams lose a game or even a series, people love to cling to excuses instead of just accepting that baseball in small samples lends itself to variance. 

Sure, we've heard former players making claims like your body doesn't adjust well to not playing games for multiple days after having played nearly every day for six months, and maybe they do feel that, but the numbers tell us otherwise.

The 2022 and 2023 Braves seemed to be the poster child for this under the current playoff format, which debuted in 2022. How many times did we hear about how unfair it was that the top two seeds were forced to sit around and get rusty while the lower seeds get to play meaningful baseball, giving them a supposed edge?

Rubbish. Utter rubbish. 

That very argument ignored the top-seeded Astros in 2022. They got a bye and then swept the Mariners in the ALDS, waited a few more days off and then swept the Yankees in the ALCS. They had another long layoff before the World Series and then beat the Phillies six games. They went 11-2 in all, the best record in this iteration of the playoffs. If the Brewers sweep here, they'll beat it.

In the current playoff format, teams with at least five days of rest before Game 1 have gone 14-10 in Games 1. You might think 10 losses is too many, but that record is a 162-game pace of 95 wins, and these are obviously all games against playoff teams. The rested teams are good, not rusty. 

Let's get back to the Brewers. They earned the spotlight just as they've been doing all playoffs and, really, nearly the entire season. They earned the rest during their bye by having the best record in baseball with 103 wins. They earned their days off before the NLCS by getting rid of the Padres in four games instead of five. They earned more than a week of rest before the World Series by taking out the two-time defending champion Dodgers in a four-game sweep. 

We already discussed the offense and Contreras behind the plate, but the Brewers again played great defense overall. There was one misplay in center in the fourth inning, but it was on a hard line drive right at Garrett Mitchell and those are always difficult to judge. The scorekeeper ruled it a double anyway, not an error.

Jacob Misiorowski, who has now thrown more than 40 innings over his previous career-high workload, saw his velocity tick up over his season average. He hadn't pitched since Oct. 11 and got deeper into the game than his previous two playoff starts. 

The Brewers are a team that shortens games with their bullpen, and while they have depth, they'd prefer to ride their three back-inning beasts in Abner Uribe, Aaron Ashby and Trevor Megill. With all that rest, that trio has been able to impact nearly every game. Those three combined for four innings of work to close down Game 1 and they'll likely all be available for a similar workload in Game 2. In fact, even if they combine for four innings again in Game 2, there's a day off before Game 3, so it wouldn't be surprising to see this exact formula for each of the first three games. Hell, they could do it in Game 4, too. 

Murphy himself said the rest was good for his squad. 

"We needed a little bit of a break," he said on Thursday. "It was an emotional series in L.A. Cross-country trip, all that. We had a few days where it was a little lighter, but then we've picked it up and gotten a lot of live ABs, but nothing simulates the game the way it is."

The rest is what is setting the Brewers up for what could well be a historic run. Again, they've only played nine games in the last 26 days, but that is because they played such great baseball that they earned their rest. Winning means rest, and rest means winning.

In order for the Rays to win the World Series, they'll now have to beat the Brewers four times in the next five or six games. To find the Brewers' last four losses, we'd have to go back to Sept. 13. They've gone 18-3 since then, despite having all those days off. 

They didn't forget how to play baseball. They may just have forgotten how to lose.