Inconvenient and iconoclastic, the 2026 World Series might save baseball
If asked to rank the league’s ideal matchup for the 2026 World Series, Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred would probably put Brewers-Rays, oh, 174th on the list. For myriad reasons – financial, political, televisual – MLB would prefer just about any other combination right now, on the precipice of a battle for the game’s soul in collective bargaining. But Brewers-Rays it will get, just like us all, starting tonight in Milwaukee, as baseball stumbles – confusingly and inadvertently – towards possible salvation.
All year long, Manfred has led a campaign, on behalf of the team owners he represents, to portray baseball as fundamentally broken. Competitive balance is out of whack, according to MLB, a consequence of fiscal inequality. Small market minnows cannot compete with big market behemoths, we are told, and implementing a salary cap – and floor – is the only way to breathe hope into moribund markets.
In a certain light, the argument makes sense. Living amid a Dodgers dynasty, with four teams accounting for almost a quarter of league spending on salaries, inequity can be found. (1) The Mets paid Juan Soto 63% of what the Guardians paid their entire team this year, while the Dodgers’ most recent $169 million luxury tax bill was more than 15 teams spent on their full 2026 rosters. (1) (2) There is a financial chasm that must be addressed, likely with a salary floor that compels the game’s elective misers to actually try. But the league’s implicit assertion that spending correlates to success has been severely damaged by a thoroughly inconvenient Fall Classic. The propaganda has hit a roadblock.
You see, only two teams spent less on 2026 payroll than Tampa Bay. Milwaukee, meanwhile, ranked 19th in payroll this year while remaining the smallest media market baseball will tolerate. (1) (3) Combined, the Brewers and Rays made $644 million in revenue last year, less than the riches reported by the Dodgers and Yankees individually. (4) By MLB’s calculus, indeed, this parsimonious pair should be nowhere near the World Series. Per the league’s rhetoric, they should be buried, unable to compete, relegated to backwater farm team status. That they are not – that Milwaukee swept the Dodgers to win the National League pennant – erodes a core tenet of Manfred’s manifesto. And that might just save baseball in the long run.
Writ large, such a statement is perhaps hyperbolic, but a small market World Series may well have a practical impact on shortening the forthcoming work stoppage. When the current collective bargaining agreement expires on 1 December, the owners will lock-out their players, who will dig in and resist salary controls as their forebears have always done. A fraught impasse will ensue, interminable save for compromise, and only concessions will break intransigence. Two of the league’s smallest spenders competing for its championship will loom as a cudgel MLB may struggle to downplay, and that, in turn, could force settlement sooner than if, say, Los Angeles completed a threepeat.
This, of course, is all very confusing and counterintuitive. A supposedly impartial league favouring certain outcomes for political expediency. The success of archetypal salary cap advocates making the installation of one less likely. The Dodgers sitting dormant, licking their wounds, plotting the resuscitation of their empire. Adding to the cognitive dissonance, this outcome is kinda aberrational. Neither Milwaukee nor Tampa Bay has ever won the World Series, and their combined championship wait spans 85 years. The last Fall Classic between two small market teams came in 1997, and the only comparatively disadvantaged team to win it since then was Kansas City in 2015. The more you zoom out, the clearer baseball’s skewed financial system becomes, but recency bias is seemingly omnipotent, and the optics will erode Manfred’s mission statement.
Away from finances and politics, though, this Brewers-Rays battle could save baseball in a far more philosophical sense. To wit, the 2026 World Series could rescue baseball from the numbing homogeneity that has threatened to muffle it into apathetic irrelevance. It could reposition as aspirational an artisan style of play abandoned at the altar of statistical efficiency, and reacquaint jaded fans with a product they once adored.
The proliferation – if not the success – of Moneyball encouraged a standardisation of data-driven decision-making. Anything that, over huge sample sizes, tends to negatively impact a team’s win probability has been shunned. Even if a sacrifice bunt or double steal seems expedient in a particular moment, with a particular hitter and a particular pitcher in a particular game scenario, data analysts have decreed it wasteful. Market inefficiencies have thus become market conventions, and certain skills – launch angle, exit velocity, OPS – have become enshrined as the only mathematically defensible modus operandi. Hence the Cashman Yankees, a spreadsheet paragon undermined by a fatal lack of feel. Hence a homogenous game dominated by walks, strikeouts and home runs. Hence a numbed malaise among tired fans.
This World Series offers respite from that stodgy sameness because the two competing teams take heterogenous approaches. They zig where everyone else zags. They prioritise skills that have fallen into disrepute. They play iconoclastic brands of baseball that differ from the stultifying orthodoxy.
In different combinations, Milwaukee and Tampa Bay ranked first and second in hits, batting average, opposite-field hit rate and bunt hits this year. The Rays also ranked second in stolen bases and defensive runs saved; the Brewers fifth in both categories. Despite hitting the second-fewest home runs, Milwaukee scored the second-most runs, while Tampa Bay was out-homered by 21 teams.
Taken together, those ‘old school’ strategies and traditional tactics create the baseball we once loved. There’s a captivating altruism to the way Milwaukee and Tampa Bay play; a refreshing commitment to grinding through one psychological puzzle after another. The Brewers and Rays have real ballplayers who think through every scenario, pitch-by-pitch, and chisel a path to team success. They have empowered managers with the autonomy to trust their gut rather than miming instructions devised by a spreadsheet. They are baseball teams, not untethered groups of slugging strangers who happen to wear the same uniform while playing Home Run Derby. Either will be a worthy champion.
Importantly, to praise this mutual nonconformism is not to rail against analytics, per se. The Brewers and Rays have been at the very vanguard of statistical enlightenment. Where Milwaukee and Tampa differ, however, is in the metrics they emphasise, value and pursue. They have tweaked their proprietary algorithms back in favour of traditional skills like speed, contact and situational awareness.
Such was its complete redrawing of perceived baseball value, metrics Moneyball deemed overvalued – batting average, stolen bases, RBIs – are now undervalued. And by refocusing on those core skills, teams with comparatively few resources – such as the Brewers and Rays – have found cheaper, more proactive and cohesively complementary ways to win.
Thus, we approach the World Series nobody wants but everybody needs. Television ratings will be down. Mainstream casuals will be bored to tears. Manfred will cringe through it all, watching his leverage dissipate. But I will love it, as will many fans of a similar ilk. It will be a throwback to a more strategic age – just in the nick of time.
And if a small-market World Series does not effect change in the commissioner’s suite, entrenched as it is in pursuit of a salary cap, perhaps it will influence front office philosophy and dugout dogma. Baseball is a copycat industry in which vogue ideology invites imitation, so maybe others will pursue the Milwaukee model or the Tampa template. Whoever wins, then, let us hope for a rekindling of that doctrine. A rekindling of the baseball we know and love, before it disappears forever.
Sources
1. 2026 MLB Team Payrolls. Spotrac. [Online] https://www.spotrac.com/mlb/payroll/_/year/2026.
2. Associated Press. ESPN. [Online] December 19, 2025. https://www.espn.co.uk/mlb/story/_/id/47360963/dodgers-hit-record-169m-luxury-tax-winning-2nd-straight-ws.
3. MLB's official "Market Score". Reddit. [Online] https://www.reddit.com/r/baseball/comments/17h9byq/mlbs_official_market_score_for_each_team_and_the/.
4. The Business of Baseball 2026. Forbes. [Online] https://www.forbes.com/mlb-valuations/list/;.