What we're watching here
- Game 5 is here: The grind of October baseball is real. After Game 4 finished in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, the Milwaukee Brewers and Tampa Bay Rays are back for Game 5 in St. Petersburg, Florida, tonight.
- Underway at the Trop: This pivotal game in St. Pete is underway with both teams’ aces on the mound. It’s 0-0 in the first.
- A historic game: The fact that this game is even being played is historic. Of the 25 previous teams to fall into an 0-3 hole in the World Series, 21 lost Game 4. None of those 25 teams have ever forced a Game 6, let alone came back to win.
- How to watch: The game is scheduled for 8 p.m. ET and will air on Fox and stream on Fox One and MLB.tv.
Updates
(10)Game 5 is a go!
He pitched on Saturday night and he asked for the ball tonight on just three days rest. Now Drew Rasmussen is getting us started.
The Tampa Bay ace fires the first pitch over for a fastball and Brewers’ young star Jackson Chourio fouls it off.
Here we go!
Score: Brewer 0, Rays 0
They’re chasing a World Series. Their families are just trying to survive October
Miller Rasmussen, the daughter of Rays’ ace and Game 5 starter Drew Rasmussen and his wife Stevie, was born during opening week of the 2026 MLB season.
It was a difficult birth, with Miller needing to spend time in the NICU. As baseball was happening every day, Stevie felt like she was immediately in survival mode. She told herself, “Just get through the end of the season.”
“Then the season’s like a little bit longer, and a little bit longer,” Stevie Rasmussen told CNN Sports.
Their rental home in St. Petersburg, Florida, ran through September, so they had to move late last month. They had the option to lease the new place for two weeks or all of October – they opted for the full month.
“So now I’m like, ‘OK, we’re here. We might as well win the whole thing,’” she said.
Down 3-1 in the World Series to the Milwaukee Brewers, the Rays will need a historic comeback to win the whole thing, but they’ve already gone deeper into the postseason than most of their players have ever experienced, with their families along for the incredibly hectic ride.
“My kids have no schedule, no nap routine,” Stevie Rasmussen said.
Read more here on how baseball families survive this crazy month.
Aaron Ashby is closing out games with deep breaths and scoreless frames
Before this year, Aaron Ashby was not a very good postseason pitcher.
The bespectacled lefty had thrown just over nine playoff innings and allowed nine runs. But right now he is on the verge of historical dominance that has helped power the Brewers to being just one win away from their first championship.
He set a new record for consecutive scoreless innings in one single postseason on Tuesday, reaching 18 straight empty frames. The previous record of 16 was set by Andrew Miller in 2016.
That may sound like a lot of conditions but it reflects a very simple fact: Ashby hasn’t allowed anything this October. Every time Brewers manager Pat Murphy calls for him out of the pen, Ashby delivers a zero.
After closing out Game 2, he said that his failures in previous postseason have taught him how to stay calm.
“Trying to grip it too tight and make too much happen, be too good, throw too hard, any number of things that you can do in big situations when there’s a lot of adrenaline,” Ashby said. “So, trying something new, I guess.”
This time around, however, “A lot of breathing, just kind of praying for peace,” Ashby said.
That and believing in his backstop.
“He is in control right now,” Ashby said of William Contreras. “I feel like I’m just trusting him. There’s not a lot of thinking I got to do.”
Tropicana Field is World-Series-ready after being shuttered for the 2025 season
The Rays are hosting their first World Series games since 2008, and their home stadium – the quirky Tropicana Field – is ready to meet the moment.
This was no certainty heading into the 2026 season, after “The Trop” sustained significant damage from Hurricane Milton in October 2024. The domed stadium’s fabric roof was ripped to shreds by the powerful winds of the storm.
The Rays spent the entire 2025 season playing their home games at cross-bay George M. Steinbrenner Field, the spring training home of the rival New York Yankees. And it was a race against the clock to get Tropicana Field ready for Opening Day this year.
But here we are, six months later, and the Fall Classic has come to St. Petersburg, and Tropicana Field’s quirky architecture might be just what the Rays need to turn the momentum of this series. The roof of the Trop, which is nearly identical in color to a baseball and criss-crossed by a network of wires and catwalks – all of which are in play – has the potential to turn any game on its head.
Depending on where a ball might strike the roof, it could result in an automatic home run or remain a live ball with the defensive players able to play the ball wherever it falls.
For anyone new to Tampa Bay Rays baseball, buckle up and expect the unexpected.
A showdown between two aces
Jacob Misiorowski and Drew Rasmussen take the bump for Wednesday’s Game 5 at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Both are pitching on short rest – the 24-year-old Misiorowski on four days after rest after the win in Game 1 and Rasmussen on three days after his start in Game 2.
But both pitchers have one thing in common – both teams win when they are on the mound.
Tampa Bay is 13-4 when Rasmussen pitches at home this season, including the playoffs, while Milwaukee is 10-4 in Miz’s 14 road starts.
Misiorowski is the front runner for the NL Cy Young award and could be the 17th eventual Cy Young winner to take the mound in a potential World Series clincher. However, historically, teams with that chance are 6-10 in the last 16 instances.
One question for both pitchers: How long will they be able to go?
Misiorowski needs to go long after the Brewers’ bullpen was severely taxed in last night’s 12-inning affair. Rasmussen doesn’t have the same luxury – Fox reports that he’s on a 60-pitch limit.
It's been a long time coming for Milwaukee
We have a favorite genre here at CNN Sports: Making players on teams identify technology from the last time their team played for a championship.
The Milwaukee Brewers were last in the World Series back in 1982. Think they can identify some early ’80s tech? Find out below:
The Rays have a chance to make (more) history
Baseball history is long. Basically everything has happened at least once. Except, that is, a comeback in the World Series for a team down three games to zero.
Of the first 25 teams that have ever fallen into such a Fall Classic hole, none came all the way back to win it all. None forced a Game 7. None forced a Game 6. Only four avoided the sweep to even play a Game 5.
The Rays, the 26th such team to find themselves on the ignominious end of a 3-0 start to the World Series, at least have done that much.
They lost each of the first two games in Milwaukee with the tying run standing on third base for the final out. They returned to Tampa, where they enjoyed the AL’s best home record in the regular season, to find Tropicana Field overrun with Milwaukee fans and got embarrassed in a blowout.
At that point, history said they should probably just pack it in.
Instead they battled for 12 innings to keep their season alive and in the end won with a barrage of singles that culminated with the last man off the bench pinch-hitting for a game-winning RBI.
“We got a lot of fight in us,” Chandler Simpson, who has flashed his vastly improved outfield defense through the series while running rampant on the basepaths, said on the Fox broadcast after the game.
“We gonna keep fighting to the end, the last inning, the last out, the last play, the last pitch. We’re gonna keep fighting like we did tonight.”
The Brewers – the best team in baseball the past two regular seasons – are fantastic, but a sweep would have obfuscated just how close a matchup this series could, and should, be – and was for at least one night (and into the wee hours of the next morning). Tampa is still on the brink.
On Wednesday, though, they get to try to do something no team has ever done before.
25 years on, the 2001 World Series still resonates
For the first time in 46 years, a sitting US president was about to throw out the first pitch in a World Series game.
Deep in the bowels of Yankee Stadium, George W. Bush was being warmed up by a man wearing a softball mitt. Outside on the diamond, a fake umpire was standing near home plate with a gun and a taser concealed beneath his uniform. Above them, the stadium was rocking, so much so that the picture frames in the offices below were hanging askew.
Nothing was normal on October 30, 2001: The New York Yankees were hosting the Arizona Diamondbacks for the biggest prize in baseball in a city still in shock – just 13 miles away, the debris from the World Trade Center still burned.
But despite all the fear and emotion, it would end up being one of the greatest World Series ever played.
Read more about why this particular edition of the Fall Classic still means so much to so many all these years later.
About last night: Rays come back in the 12th to extend the series
The Tampa Bay Rays gave the Milwaukee Brewers a dose of their own medicine in Game 4 to avoid getting swept Tuesday night (and Wednesday morning) in St. Petersburg, Florida.
The Rays extended their season at least one more day thanks to a walk-off single from Ben Williamson to win the game, 4-3, in 12 innings.
The Rays jumped out to an early lead with an RBI double from Chandler Simpson to get the scoring started in the second inning.
But just as they have all season, the Brewers always seemed to have an answer. Milwaukee leveled the game at 1-1 in the top of the fourth inning on a Cooper Pratt double.
The Rays immediately reclaimed the lead in the bottom of the fourth thanks to a throwing error from Brewers third baseman David Hamilton, who immediately atoned with a game-tying home run in the fifth inning to knot the game at 2-2.
The game would grind on tied 2-2 into the late innings, and eventually into extra innings. As each team exhausted their bullpen and bench, it became a question of which team was going to blink first.
Tuesday turned into Wednesday as the game reached a climactic 12th inning. Pratt struck again for Milwaukee with a towering home run into the left field seats off Tampa Bay reliever Ian Seymour that had the Brewers sitting on the brink of their first championship in franchise history.
But the Rays channeled their inner Brewer in the bottom of the 12th inning. That meant small ball and a lot of traffic on the base paths.
Junior Caminero led off the inning with a bouncer to third base and reached safely on a throwing error by replacement third baseman Joey Ortiz. Liam Hicks followed that with a soft chopper that found its way into left field and moved Caminero to third base.
Next up, Jonny DeLuca hit a seeing-eye grounder back up the middle and through to center field to drive in pinch-runner Cedric Mullins. After failing to get a sacrifice bunt down, Simpson lined a single into center field to load the bases with no one out.
Ben Williamson then stepped to the plate a hit a high chopper over the first baseman’s head and into right field to score pinch-runner Nick Fortes with the game-winning run.
Baseball lives to play another day in 2026
Feel like you were just here?
After a very late night in Game 4, dragging into the early hours of Wednesday, a critical Game 5 is on deck at 8 p.m. ET. The Brewers remain in the same position as they were last night: One win away from the franchise’s first World Series title. They got as close as being three outs away last night, they’ll want to put the finishing touches on their great season tonight.
For the Rays, they’re suddenly alive. After getting blown out in Game 3, the Rays played like … well, the Rays on Tuesday. When they went down in the top of the 12th inning, Tampa fired back and won the game in the bottom of the inning to extend their season another night.
History is against them, but there’s always that lingering feeling … what if?
History is stacked against the Rays, but they’ll be looking to send this series back to Milwaukee for a Game 6 on Friday night with another win tonight.
The game is scheduled to start at 8 p.m. ET and airs on Fox/streams on Fox One and MLB.tv. We’ll be here all night – again – with all the live updates, analysis, reporting and highlights you could want.
