The Brewers Won the World Series on Wednesday. Four of Their Players Were Free Agents by Thursday Morning.
Milwaukee beat Tampa Bay 4-1 at Tropicana Field on Wednesday night and won the first World Series in franchise history. Thursday morning at 9 a.m. Eastern, four Brewers filed for free agency.
That is baseball’s calendar, and it does not care that the confetti was 36 hours old.
Who Is Actually Leaving
Start with the correction, because the headlines this week have been sloppy. Nobody has signed anywhere. Nobody can. The five-day exclusive window runs through November 2, and until 5 p.m. Eastern that day, Milwaukee is the only team allowed to negotiate with any of them.
The four, per MLB’s official transaction tracker: right-handers Brandon Woodruff and Dustin May, first baseman and outfielder Jake Bauers, and left-handed reliever JoJo Romero.
The mechanisms are different, and that matters more than it sounds. May declined his half of a $20 million mutual option, taking a $500,000 buyout, which Jon Heyman reported Thursday. Mutual options almost never get picked up by both sides, so treat that as paperwork. Woodruff, Bauers and Romero simply had contracts run out.
Woodruff’s case has one wrinkle teams will notice: he accepted Milwaukee’s qualifying offer last November, which means he cannot receive another one. No draft-pick compensation attaches to him. Whoever signs him gives up nothing.
Woodruff’s October Was One Inning, and It Still Mattered
Woodruff is 33, made nine starts in 2026 and posted a 2.98 ERA across 45.1 innings. Then the season fell apart. His fastball dropped from an average of 92.5 mph to 86.6 by his last start on July 4. He landed on the 60-day injured list, and on July 18 the Brewers announced he needed season-ending shoulder surgery.
On August 22, new imaging said the surgery was not necessary.
He threw for five weeks and made the 26-man World Series roster, replacing Chad Patrick. Milwaukee knew that if his shoulder went again, MLB would not approve a replacement. They carried him anyway. He pitched one inning in the Game 3 blowout, gave up a run, and that was his postseason.
One inning, 9.00 ERA. Also the longest-tenured player on a franchise that had never won anything, on the mound in the World Series after being told in July he was done. Both of those are true.
May is 29 and had the opposite kind of October. He threw 145.2 innings overall with a 4.70 ERA, then a 5.65 mark in 36.2 innings after coming over from St. Louis at the deadline. He made four postseason appearances, allowed seven runs in 11 innings, and started Game 4, the clincher that was not, a 4-3 loss in 12 innings that produced Tampa Bay’s only win of the series.
The Real Deadline Is December 1
Here is the part Milwaukee cannot control. The collective bargaining agreement expires December 1 at 11:59 p.m. Eastern, and the players’ union has publicly said it expects owners to lock players out when it does. CBS Sports reported this week that a lockout is very likely and that a new deal beforehand would be a major surprise.
Nothing has happened yet. There is no lockout. But every date on the offseason calendar now sits in front of that one: free agency opens November 2, qualifying offers are due the same day at a record $23.15 million, the acceptance deadline is November 17, non-tenders are November 20.
Four weeks, and then possibly nothing for a long time.
The Brewers won 103 games and a title with the 19th-ranked payroll in baseball, roughly $154.7 million by luxury-tax measure. President of baseball operations Matt Arnold has said sustainability is core to how ownership operates. He has not said a word this week about re-signing any of the four, and neither has Pat Murphy.
The only thing close was a hot mic at the trophy celebration, Murphy needling Bauers about free agency. Bauers, the NLCS MVP who hit 26 home runs: “You’re not getting rid of me that easy.”
He has until Monday to find out.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
