Rust? What rust? Brewers open World Series refreshed and ready thanks to all that winning

The Brewers have now played nine games in the last 26 days and they MILWAUKEE — The Milwaukee Brewers won Game 1 of the World Series, 3-2, Friday night at American Family Field. It was their first win since Thursday, Oct. 15. They hadn't lost since then either, though; they had been off. Any time a team has a long layoff in the postseason, we end up hearing the same tired song and dance. "Rust vs. Rest" is the succinct headline. The basic argument is that with baseball being a daily sport in the regular season, teams sitting around for multiple days between series — or between the end of the regular season and the divisional series — are at some sort of disadvantage because they'll come out rusty.

One example obviously doesn't disprove a theory — though we have several more and we'll get to those — but the Brewers are doing their best to kill that narrative. In the first inning of World Series Game 1 on Friday, Jackson Chourio led off with a single. Christian Yelich tripled him home and then scored on a William Contreras single. In the span of four batters, the team that spent seven full days without playing a game just scored two runs. Nick Martinez, on the mound for the Rays, wasn't