Inside the Rays’ 12th-Inning Rally That Canceled the Brewers’ Championship Celebration. At Least for Now

St. Petersburg — It was 20 minutes past midnight, the championship witching hour, when attendants began scrambling under one of the cruelest directives that can be issued in a baseball season: the celebration is canceled. Take down the plastic hung over the lockers in the visiting clubhouse of Tropicana Field. Wheel the bins loaded with champagne the hell out of there. Ditch the hats and T-shirts that said, “Milwaukee Brewers, 2026 World Series champions,” which had been sitting in boxes in a ramp near the Brewers’ dugout.

The Tampa Bay Rays, down to the last three outs of their season, were fighting to their last breath in World Series Game 4 Tuesday. They had just put runners on first and third with no outs. That’s when the evacuation drill was put into effect.

Your flight is canceled. The wedding is off. The party has been scuttled. Nothing to see here. Drive home safely.

All the celebratory champagne and beer had to be removed from the Brewers clubhouse after they blew their lead in the 12th inning pic.twitter.com/3U39GXf62j
— Jomboy Media (@JomboyMedia) October 28, 2026

Eight minutes later, it was official. The first championship in the history of the Brewers was canceled with the most Deadball of Deadball rallies: five straight grounders skittering around the Trop’s turf, capped by a ridiculous high bouncer by Ben Williamson off pitcher Shane Drohan, history decided by deep rostered players almost four and a half hours into an exhausting night. John McGraw would have been proud of the bouncing resourcefulness. Or as The Bohemian Girl put it operatically, “I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls.”

The Brewers practically had the championship, the hats, the T-shirts, the champagne and the whole shebang in their hands, only to return to their sanitized, dry clubhouse with a 4–3 loss and the pain of what nearly was.

Tampa Bay lived to see another day with an extra-innings rally in Game 4. | Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated

Almost immediately, the Brewers tried to move on from the void. While there was no formal meeting, several players spoke up.

“Hey, it’s not supposed to be easy,” captain Christian Yelich told them. “It’s supposed to be hard. This is part of what it takes.”

Hard is one thing. Painful and scarring is another. The Brewers are the only franchise to come within one win of winning the World Series without ever having won the darn thing. And now they’ve done it twice—1982 and 2026, the Scream 2 sequel in their horror ouvre. Both times Milwaukee blew a lead.

It simply cannot come easily for the Brewers. They have the all-time worst record of any franchise in possible clinchers, 6–12. Super reliever Aaron Ashby has finally hit a wall. The defense is noticeably nervy.

The saving grace to this spate of bad news is that Milwaukee holds a huge pitching advantage in Game 5 Wednesday: Jacob Misiorowski, the best pitcher in baseball this year, behind whom the Brewers have won 12 straight starts, against an exhausted Tampa Bay bullpen.

“Nobody said this was going to be easy,” said Brewers shortstop Cooper Pratt. “Because they're a really good team. They've proven that all year, and, yeah, we just come back tomorrow ready to play.”

No one lost more from the canceled party than Pratt, who with the Tampa Bay rally was reduced from an October legend to a footnote. Pratt, a rookie, in the top of the 12th hit what was only his fourth home run, a no-doubter blast off Rays reliever Ian Seymour, who has been serving up homers with stunning regularity.

COOPER PRATT GIVES THE @BREWERS THE LEAD WITH A HOME RUN IN THE 12TH INNING!@MLBONFOX pic.twitter.com/OxpIjmIr44
— FOX Sports (@FOXSports) October 28, 2026

Pratt is from Senatobia, Mississippi, population 8,500, or as his father, Russ, likes to call it, “Middle of Nowhere, Miss.” Russ is a former college player who runs a training facility called The Farm. Cooper has two uncles who played pro ball, including one, Ted Pratt, who played for now Brewers manager Pat Murphy at Arizona State.

“I knew it was gone,” Cooper said of his home run. “It was pretty cool. I don't really remember much after that—just, you know, screaming.”

Pratt was going to join Will Smith and Mel Ott as the only players to hit a World Series-deciding home run in extra innings. All the Brewers needed to do was rely on their bullpen for three more outs. In Game 4 it had faced 26 batters and permitted only two balls out of the infield. What could go wrong?

Murphy had run out of good options. He had pulled Ashby in the 11th after he threw 31 pitches to get seven outs, setting a postseason record with 18 scoreless innings.

“His velocity was down,” Murphy said. “He was throwing 94 [mph]. I can’t do that to him. I can’t leave him out there when he is showing signs of fatigue.”

Said Ashby, “I think I had an idea of why he was coming out. I think I saw the last fastball or so was ticking down, and I knew that was probably going to be it in their mind. And I felt good. I think, probably it’s just a part of throwing a lot of innings.

“I think it’s maybe the time in between innings [is a factor]. When the innings are fast, it's pretty easy. But when you start to sit down, they’re a little bit longer, whatever it may be, that maybe starts to take a little bit of a more of a toll.”

Asked if he could pitch in Game 5, Ashby said, “I don't ever make any assumptions on how I feel until I play catch tomorrow. So, I try to keep it like that all year long. I'll wait till tomorrow after I play catch, and then I'll let Murph know if I feel good enough to go or not.”

Antonio Senzatela followed Ashby. Pratt’s homer stood to make him the winning pitcher of the Brewers’ first World Series clincher. He got a routine ground ball from Junior Caminero to start the bottom of the 12th inning. Harmless enough. But Joey Ortiz, playing third base, for a second straight throw alligator-armed the baseball, sending it skittering away from first baseman Jake Bauers. It was his second straight ugly throw with a hint of the yips.

”I think I should have took another couple more steps towards first [base],” he said. “There's no excuses. Not one at all. I should make that play every [bleeping] time.”

Senzatela was tiring. Murphy had to give the ball to Drohan, a rookie who had thrown one inning in the past month.

Four straight singles followed, by Liam Hicks, Johnny DeLuca, Chandler Simpson and Williamson. Game over. World Series title taken away.

Here is the full Rays rally that forced a World Series Game 5! pic.twitter.com/igyyvWxKk4
— Jomboy Media (@JomboyMedia) October 28, 2026

“In those moments when Cooper comes up and does that,” Ashby said of his homer, “you're fired up beyond disbelief. And then there's still three more outs to go. So, it's just, one of those things. That sucks for it to be in that game. We're still in a great situation to come out here tomorrow and compete our butts off.”

There are people who believe the witching hour refers to the time in the darkness of night when the veil that separates life and death is thinnest. To that idea the Brewers and Rays can attest in Game 4. The Brewers’ championship died, at least for the night, just as it did for the 1912 Giants, the 1986 Red Sox and the 2011 Rangers, all of whom took a lead into the bottom of an extra inning in a possible clincher and lost. None wound up getting the title back in their hands.

The Brewers have three more chances. They have waited 58 seasons for the franchise’s first title. What’s one more day? It should be nothing. But when things start to go bump in the night, including the rattling of carts filled with champagne and the hiding of boxes of the first shirts ever printed declaring the Brewers champions, the elusiveness of a dream can get downright scary.

Add us as a preferred source on Google