ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. -- Sadness, as expected, tinted the home clubhouse at Tropicana Field after midnight Thursday morning. The Tampa Bay Rays were still coming to terms with losing the World Series to the Milwaukee Brewers in five games. An eight-plus-month journey that started with a celebrated return to their home ballpark and that was spent defying expectations and becoming as tight-knit as a professional ballclub can become was suddenly over with a 4-1 loss Wednesday.
There was heartache. There were tears. But, above all, there was pride.
"I'm really just proud," Rays All-Star closer Bryan Baker said. "I'm just proud to be part of this group."
Baker was one of seven Rays pitchers who took the mound with the season on the line Wednesday. He tossed a scoreless eighth inning after logging two frames -- something he hadn't done all year -- in Tampa Bay's 12-inning win Tuesday to keep its season alive. He was part of a pitching plan Rays brass scrambled together after Nick Martinez, their scheduled Game 5 starter, was needed for two innings out of the bullpen in Game 4.
It launched with Drew Rasmussen, the club's ace, taking the mound on three days' rest for the first time in his career as a full-fledged starter. Rasmussen -- after throwing 89 pitches over 3⅔ innings in Game 2 on Saturday -- was asked after Game 4 whether he was willing to make the start. He accepted the challenge. Rays manager Kevin Cash told Rasmussen, who has undergone three major elbow surgeries in the past decade, there would be strict limitations. Four innings or 60 pitches, whichever came first.
"This organization, man, it's the best," Rasmussen said. "They always look out for me. They were doing their best to protect me, and unfortunately, their biggest enemy is myself."
Rasmussen held Milwaukee to one run over four innings on just 48 pitches. He was sharp, and he could have gone longer. But Cash -- six years after infamously pulling Blake Snell in the sixth inning of Game 6 of the 2020 World Series -- stuck to the plan. He replaced Rasmussen with right-hander Kevin Kelly to begin the fifth.
"That was the easiest call in the world to take him out of the ballgame," Cash said. "We've worked very hard with all our pitchers and pride ourselves on doing right by them."
Kelly proceeded to allow three consecutive one-out singles to Milwaukee's No. 7, 8 and 9 hitters. Brewers third baseman David Hamilton supplied the third single -- a ground ball through the right side of a drawn-in infield -- to score Cooper Pratt and double the Brewers' lead. Milwaukee tacked on two more runs in the sixth inning against Garrett Cleavinger and Tyler Wells to effectively put the game away for their 11th win in 13 postseason games as Jacob Misiorowski, the heavy favorite to win the National League Cy Young Award, and three Brewers relievers held the Rays without a run until the ninth inning.
"That's the best team I've played at the major league level," Rasmussen said. "I think this is my sixth or seventh season. It's the best team I've played against."
Tampa Bay, coming off consecutive fourth-place finishes in the American League East, was widely predicted to finish fifth in 2026. To outsiders, the organization's low-budget magic was undergoing a reset after five consecutive postseason appearances from 2019 through 2023. The AL East, the prognosticators decided, belonged to the big-market clubs in New York, Boston and Toronto.
But the Rays took hold of the best record in the AL in late June and didn't let go, finishing with 98 wins in the regular season before sweeping the New York Yankees in the AL Division Series and vanquishing the Cleveland Guardians in six games in the AL Championship Series. They were a juggernaut back at Tropicana Field after spending the 2025 season playing their home games at the Yankees' spring training facility after Hurricane Milton left the dome in shambles.
The tenets for their success were a strong starting rotation with Baker in the back end, an unrivaled ability to put pressure on opponents and the three hitters at the top of their lineup.
Rasmussen and Martínez were All-Stars in the rotation. Freddy Peralta pitched like one down the stretch after being acquired at the trade deadline. Baker emerged to become one of the sport's best relievers.
Offensively, the Rays had the highest contact rate and lowest strikeout rate in the majors. They bunted more than any club. They finished second in steals. Junior Caminero, Yandy Diaz and Jonathan Aranda supplied most of the team's pop. Each player knew his role and played it well. They prided themselves on not beating themselves.
So Tampa Bay's sloppiness in the first three games of the World Series was shocking. The Rays made several uncharacteristic mistakes in the field and on the basepaths to dig themselves a 3-0 hole. They mustered an unlikely 12-inning comeback win in Game 4 on the backs of the bottom of their lineup to give themselves another day. But no team has ever clawed back from such a World Series deficit, and the Brewers were too good to let that happen.
"I think they played good baseball, very good baseball, really good baseball," Caminero, the Rays' 23-year-old All-Star third baseman, said in Spanish. "We gave the best we could, but it didn't turn out how we wanted."
Caminero, the presumptive AL MVP runner-up, went 1-for-4 on Wednesday after aggravating a left foot injury that he had been managing for months in Game 4. Around him postgame, teammates and coaches were saying their goodbyes. They congratulated each other. They hugged. Tears were shed. Beers were consumed.
"I'm crushed right now, disappointed," Cash said. "But it's easier to handle because of what we all meant to each other throughout the course of this season and certainly this last month in October."
It was a team that grew close -- many said closer than any club they had been on -- thanks in large part to Martinez. The 36-year-old right-hander emerged as a clubhouse leader after signing a one-year deal days before the start of spring training by planning a team dinner for each road city that his teammates swore made a difference in clubhouse chemistry.
For eight months, they used that camaraderie and their particular brand of baseball to exceed expectations until they reached the third World Series in the team's 29-year history. In the end, after a franchise-record 106 wins between the regular season and playoffs, they confronted a relentless buzzsaw of a team that simply played better.
"They did everything to win the World Series," Baker said. "It was an impressive display of baseball."