MILWAUKEE — Two outs, two men on, and the scoreboard reading 3-2 in favor of the Cubs. The Brewers were six outs from squandering their shot at a 90th win. Then Jackson Chourio stepped in.
The 22-year-old launched a two-run home run into the left-center stands at American Family Field on Monday night, a ball that left his bat and seemed to carry not just through the Wisconsin air but through the weight of what this franchise is trying to accomplish. The Brewers beat the Chicago Cubs 4-3 in 10 innings, becoming baseball’s first 90-win team in 2026 and putting a franchise-record 100 victories squarely within reach.
“It’s moments like that,” manager Pat Murphy said after the game. “You see a kid who’s not afraid of the big moment. Not even a little bit.”
The win came on the strength of Chourio’s 22nd home run of the season, a two-run shot that tied the game at three in the ninth inning before Luis Lara delivered a walk-off RBI single in the 10th. But the home run was the story that mattered.
The Cubs carried a 3-1 lead into the final inning and appeared poised to hand the Brewers only their second home loss in 14 games. But with two outs and a full count, Chourio launched a 96-mph sinker over the left-center-field wall, transforming the game with one swing. The crowd at American Family Field was still absorbing the sudden turnaround when Luis Lara ended the game an inning later.
The comparison is not yet earned. Trout’s second full season produced a .326 average and 8.8 WAR, numbers Chourio has not yet approached. But in September of a season where the Brewers have been baseball’s best story, nothing about Chourio feels unreasonable to contemplate.
“He’s different,” Murphy said. “The position he puts himself in, mentally, is just different.”
Lara’s walk-off, which came off a Cubs reliever who had retired the previous four batters, was swallowed somewhat by the noise of what Chourio had done. The 24-year-old outfielder has hit in 11 of his last 14 games, a stretch that has coincided almost exactly with Milwaukee’s late-season surge. As the NL playoff race tightens through September, that kind of production from a complementary piece matters enormously.
The franchise has now reached 90 wins faster in 2026 than in any previous season in its history. The 2025 Brewers, who set the franchise record with 97 wins, needed more than two weeks of additional September play to accomplish the same milestone. This version of the team is different, built carefully and deepened at the trade deadline in ways Murphy referenced without specifically naming.
Garrett Misiorowski, the Brewers’ ace who has now thrown more than 1,000 triple-digit fastballs on the season, was not involved in Monday’s game. But the confidence his presence provides to a rotation that entered September with the second-best ERA in the National League tells you something about why this 90-win benchmark feels different from any previous marker in franchise history.
The path to 100 wins requires going 10-6 the rest of the way. The schedule includes eight more games against division opponents, with two final series against the Cubs still to come. The magic number to clinch the NL Central sits at five.
What the franchise has never done, in 57 years of existence, is win a hundred games in a regular season. Not in the years of Robin Yount and Paul Molitor. Not when the 1982 Brewers went to the World Series. Not in the analytics era, where the milestones of baseball history feel simultaneously more tracked and more elusive.
What the 2026 Brewers accomplish with the next 16 games will determine how this season is remembered. What Chourio accomplished Monday night, in the ninth inning with the season’s first 90-win benchmark on the line, determined that he belongs in those conversations.
The ball is still traveling.
