Whether you love dramatic finishes, thrilling moments or incredible individual performances, the 2026 MLB playoffs provided a little bit of everything.
A week after the Milwaukee Brewers lifted their first World Series championship trophy, we asked our MLB experts to pick the best single moments, games and series from the entire postseason -- along with their lasting October impressions.
From wild-card thrillers to World Series heroics, here is the best of the best from every round of the 2026 postseason.
What was the defining moment of the entire MLB playoffs?
Bradford Doolittle: As it turned out, I was at all the Brewers' playoff games except the two in San Diego. So I was there when Ty France launched a ball off the American Family Field ceiling, or some wires or whatever, and Jackson Chourio stuck with the play and caught it and the Brewers won. All through the rest of the postseason, Milwaukee manager Pat Murphy alluded to the play as Bob Uecker reaching down from the great beyond to swat that ball down to help the Brewers.
I can't get on board with that, but at the same time it was a moment when I felt like Milwaukee was destined to win. And all through the Brewers' run, it felt like so many borderline moments, whether resolved by luck or skill, went Milwaukee's way. You take baseball's best team and then give it the majority of the breaks and you have what we ended up with: a champion that went 11-2 en route to winning it all.
David Schoenfield: Given the strength of the top teams in the NL compared to the obvious weaknesses of the best AL teams, it felt like the NLCS between the Brewers and Dodgers was going to decide the eventual World Series champ. After losing Game 1 with Tarik Skubal, the Dodgers at least knew they had 2025 postseason hero Yoshinobu Yamamoto going in Game 2. Then came the bottom of the third inning and Jake Bauers' walk.
How can a walk be the defining moment of the MLB playoffs? Because it was a 12-pitch walk with Bauers grinding and battling and fouling off six pitches with a 3-2 count before finally drawing ball four. It wiped out Yamamoto. Christian Yelich followed with a go-ahead two-run single and Yamamoto was out of the game, unable to finish the inning. The Dodgers would actually retake the lead, but with Yamamoto gone early, the Brewers went back ahead against the Dodgers' second-line relievers. The Brewers had won games that Skubal and Yamamoto started. Neither would throw another pitch.
Jeff Passan: If anything encapsulated the 2026 Milwaukee Brewers, it was the fifth inning of Game 3 of the World Series. After Christian Yelich's excellent baserunning instincts saved the inning from ending on a force play at second, the Brewers rapped two-out hit after two-out hit en route to scoring eight runs and extending a 2-0 advantage to 10-0. This wasn't a moment, per se; it was 26 minutes of horror for Tampa Bay. And those minutes birthed a moment that's undeniable: the one in which the Rays understood just how different the Brewers really were.
What was the single best game of the entire MLB postseason?
Buster Olney: The Padres could've upended the Brewers' championship run in the division series between the two teams, and it looked like they might be in position to do that in Game 2, when they handed a 3-2 lead to the most feared closer in the game, Mason Miller.
The right-hander, asked to get the last six outs, zipped through three Milwaukee hitters in the eighth, needing only 12 pitches. But in the ninth, the Brewers' hitters did what they became known for in October: grinding through at-bats. With Miller suddenly struggling to command his fastball, Christian Yelich worked a walk, and after Yelich stole second, Sal Frelick walked. Then Miller's slider began to flatten out as his pitch count mounted, and pinch hitter Gary Sanchez stared him down for another walk, loading the bases.
Miller's pitch count had climbed over 30, and with his slider failing him, he leaned into his fastball against Jackson Chourio - and the 22-year-old swung confidently, aggressively. Miller's 40th pitch was a 101 mph fastball, and Chourio lashed a single to center to drive in the winning run. From that point forward, no one seriously threatened the Brewers.
Alden Gonzalez: This might not have been the best game of the postseason, per se, but it's one that shouldn't be lost to history. The Braves decided to push their ace, Chris Sale, back to Game 3 of the NLDS, a risky decision that felt calamitous after the Dodgers took Game 1.
Atlanta's hopes of maintaining a reasonable chance of winning the series would fall on the shoulders of its bullpen. And then Ray Kerr, a minor league journeyman who famously once worked at 7-Eleven, and Didier Fuentes, a 20-year-old who graduated to the big leagues much earlier than expected, combined for 19 of the Braves' 27 outs in an improbable victory, delivering 6⅓ innings of one-run ball.
The Braves went on to lose the next two games and were thus eliminated, but Game 2 of the NLDS was a reminder of what makes postseason baseball so great -- the surprises that define October, the guys you've never heard of who become heroes.
Jorge Castillo: The Brewers won the World Series in five games, but the matchup was plenty closer than that indicates. Three of the five games were decided by one run, including my pick for the best game of the postseason: Game 4 at Tropicana Field.
Tampa Bay appeared on its way to getting swept when Cooper Pratt homered off Ian Seymour in the 12th inning to give the Brewers a 3-2 lead and move them within three outs of the first championship in franchise history. But the Rays, after not scoring since the fourth inning, scored two runs on an error and four straight singles without recording an out to keep their season alive.
The teams combined to use 15 pitchers. The Rays emptied their bench. Ben Williamson, the final player off that bench, delivered the walk-off single -- a ball that bounced off the artificial turf in front of home plate and into shallow right field. For one night, the Rays had hope.
What was the best series of the playoffs, from any round?
Jesse Rogers: If you can believe it, there were only two series that went the distance this October: The Braves beating the Phillies in the wild-card round and the Guardians outlasting the White Sox in their division series matchup.
The latter turned out to be one of the best of October as it featured a little bit of everything: Road teams winning the first four games, come-from-behind victories and dramatic moments -- like when Cleveland lefty Erik Sabrowski struck out Munetaka Murakami with the bases loaded in Game 5. Both fan bases were energized throughout the series, providing more energy in the building than some other contests in October. Oh, and Cleveland stormed back from 2-0 in the series to win it. It was a good one.
Olney: The Padres were the hottest team in the majors the last two months of the regular season, and in the divisional round, they faced the best team from 2026, the Brewers. It felt to a lot of folks in the game that the eventual champion would emerge from this series, and after some great moments -- Chourio's game-winning hit off Miller in Game 2, Garrett Mitchell intercepting a would-be home run in Petco Park -- Milwaukee survived the Padres and went 8-1 in its remaining postseason games.
Gonzalez: Buster is correct. There was no better series than Brewers-Padres. It lasted only four games, but every one of them contained a defining moment (don't forget Game 3, when Michael King, pitching two days after his start, took down the last two innings to save the Padres' season on a night when both Adrian Morejon and Mason Miller were unavailable).
The Brewers went on to sweep the Dodgers in the NLCS and breeze past the Rays in the final round. By the end, it was clear that the Padres were their biggest challenge. If any one moment goes the other way -- France's fly ball, Chourio's at-bat, King's appearance, Machado's fly ball -- we might be looking at a different World Series champion right now.
What is your lasting takeaway of this MLB postseason?
Passan: The return of small-market, low-payroll teams to the apex of the sport amid a labor negotiation in which the owners continue to suggest small-market, low-payroll teams can't compete in the current environment. The league's point about the recent history of World Series participants coming from larger markets and payrolls is fair, but multiple owners, speaking on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged that the Brewers and Rays facing off in the World Series did little to help reinforce their argument that a salary cap's main purpose would serve competitive balance.
Schoenfield: The perception -- incorrect -- that the Brewers were some scrappy, small-ball team that punched above its weight and slapped the ball around to victory. Nonsense. Yes, the Brewers have made some wonderful moves through the years to obtain players other teams didn't want, especially flipping Josh Hader for Robert Gasser (their Game 3 starter) and Esteury Ruiz, who was later traded for William Contreras. They got closer Trevor Megill for nothing, and Jake Bauers emerged off the scrap heap to have a star turn in 2026.
But this team has talented players up and down the roster: Brice Turang was a first-round pick in 2018, Garrett Mitchell in 2020, Sal Frelick in 2021. Yelich, Andrew Vaughn and DL Hall were first-round picks by other organizations. Cooper Pratt was a sixth-round pick, but regarded as a first-round talent and signed for second-round money. Jacob Misiorowski was a second-round pick. Jackson Chourio was the No. 2 prospect in the game. Luis Lara is a 21-year-old speedster who can run everything down in the outfield.
Yes, the Brewers have a different style -- they had the highest ground ball rate in the majors -- but they still hit the ball hard. They had the seventh-highest average exit velocity in the regular season and the third-most balls hit at 100-plus mph. They draw walks -- second-most in the regular season and 15 more than their opponents during the postseason. Most of the position players can run as well. They draft athletes and develop them and get their pitchers to throw harder or throw more strikes.
They actually struck out a few more times than their opponents during the playoffs. Sure, they hit "only" 13 home runs in 14 playoff games -- but they outhomered their opponents 13-4. They won with scouting, player development, execution, plate discipline and enough home run power. They have good baseball players. That's why they won.
Doolittle: As soon as the World Series matchup was set, I was fixated on the television ratings. I wasn't so much concerned with comparisons to the past two years, which both featured ideal conditions to produce big ratings. I was really curious how they would compare to 2023 -- the Rangers-Diamondbacks matchup that did not fare well in the ratings game. It was a short series, like this one, and also didn't feature markets favored by television, or at least as I understand the subject.
This series by all accounts fared way better than that one, with around 11.7 million viewers on average as compared to around 9.1 million in 2023. Here is my contention: People were thrilled by this matchup and this was true because of how these teams play baseball and, most crucially, because they were the respective top seeds in their leagues. It was the same matchup we would have gotten if we were still using the format in place from 1903 to 1968. In 2023, by contrast, we were watching a 5-seed against a 6-seed.
I think this matters -- a lot -- and I think favoring a format that rewards regular season excellence should be paramount when we consider such things going forward.