Roughly one (1) in 35,000 youth baseball players reach Major League Baseball. Then, less than a quarter of the players who are actively playing in MLB will ever claim a World Series title.
That equates to about 0.000657142% of kids who played tee ball or Little League ever bringing home a pennant. Those odds are barely above those of getting struck by lightning at some point in your lifetime.
However, those odds just fell in favor of former Texas baseball player David Hamilton, who clinched the World Series with the Milwaukee Brewers last night, defeating the Tampa Bay Rays, 4-1.
our World Series champ 🏆#HookEm | @D_Ham27 pic.twitter.com/BepLKUjqnc
— Texas Baseball (@TexasBaseball) October 29, 2026
In the five-game series, Hamilton racked up four hits, including a home run, to score four RBI, while hitting well over the .350 mark. He committed one error in the fourth game of the series, but made up for it with his home run later that game, despite the fact that the Rays won Game 4 in extra innings.
The Longhorn Legend earned his first-ever ring just seven years after being drafted and only four years after being called up to the majors. Hamilton became the 12th former Longhorn to ever win the World Series.
David Hamilton joins short list of Texas Longhorns to win it all
While Hamilton never won the College World Series with the Horns, playing for Texas from 2017 through 2019, he has now joined an elite list of players who moved on from the 40 Acres to win big at the next level.
Hamilton is the first Longhorn to accomplish the feat in over a decade:
- Pinky Higgins, 1930, Philadelphia Athletics
- Norm Branch, 1941, New York Yankees
- Howie Reed, 1965, Los Angeles Dodgers
- Keith Moreland, 1980, Philadelphia Phillies
- Burt Hooton, 1981, Los Angeles Dodgers
- Billy Bates, 1990, Cincinnati Reds
- Dennis Cook, 1997, Florida Marlins
- Roger Clemens, 1999, New York Yankees
- Roger Clemens, 2000, New York Yankees
- Greg Swindell, 2001, Arizona Diamondbacks
- Brandon Belt, 2012, San Francisco Giants
- Brandon Workman, 2013, Boston Red Sox
- Brandon Belt, 2014, San Francisco Giants
- David Hamilton, 2026, Milwaukee Brewers
If you're curious, the fact that Hamilton won the World Series after failing to do so in college is more common than not. Out of that list of a dozen former Longhorns, only three won both the CWS and the title at the next level: Roger Clemens, Keith Moreland, and Billy Bates.
Only two former Texas baseball players have ever won multiple World Series rings, Clemens and Brandon Belt, with Clemens being the only Longhorn to win back-to-back titles.
Next year, it will be time to see if Hamilton can join Clemens in that extremely exclusive group.
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