Even though the 2026 World Series matchup is not set yet, here are the facts today on MLB Monday: the Milwaukee Brewers—with the 17th-highest payroll in the 38th-largest TV market—are in after sweeping the two-time defending champion Los Angeles Dodgers (first in payroll, second in market size) in the National League Championship Series, while the Cleveland Guardians (26th, 19th) and the Tampa Bay Rays (19th, 11th) still are playing in the American League Championship Series.
With the Rays up 3-2 in the best-of-seven matchup and hosting Game 6—and Game 7, if necessary—the odds are they will face the Brew Crew in the Fall Classic. Tampa Bay has a 55.5-percent chance of winning Game 6 on Tuesday night, and the World Series itself would start on Friday even if a Game 7 is needed on Wednesday evening. On any given game day, the Rays would be half-run favorites over the Guardians, any way, and tossing in home-field advantage? Well, it should be Tampa, yo.
Either way, we’re going to get a low(er)-payroll team winning the Series for the first time since 2017, when the Houston Trashstros cheated their way to title. That is only time a franchise with a payroll lower than the league average has won the MLb championship since the 1994 strike. Thus, in this way, we’re seeing “competitive balance” in the sport, just in time for the CBA negotiations regarding a potential salary cap this winter offseason. Skeptics we are, we don’t think it’s coincidence.
The Brewers were the top sabermetric team in the majors this year, but they will not bring big TV ratings. Tampa, as we noted in August, has moved up to being on the bigger markets now in the country, at least since its last Series appearance in 2020. A Cleveland-Milwaukee matchup probably bring some bad TV ratings, and we know how MLB revenue works as dissected here previously. So, Tampa has both the TV revenue and the sabermetrics going in its favor against the Guardians (points in fact).
Let’s say it is a Milwaukee-Tampa Bay affair in the Fall Classic: we’d have a guaranteed first-time MLB champion, which is worth some extra TV juice for fans who want to watch and aren’t bitter about their own team’s absence. The Brewers definitely would be the sabermetric favorites to win it all (0.8-run edge per game, which is big), and if they did win, they’d be just the second team in a small TV market to win the Series since the 1994 strike. We discussed these odds earlier, so we knew them.
Have the Brewers surprised us? Yes and no. But they had the slight sabermetric edge on the Dodgers (barely), and somehow, they parlayed that into a four-game sweep. We think of teams that swept their LCS matchups and then had to wait for the other LCS to go six or seven games. Needless to say, the results in the Series were’t very good: we’re thinking of the 2004 St. Louis Cardinals, or the 2006 Detroit Tigers, and especially the 2007 Colorado Rockies, among others. You just never know, really.
We don’t really care who wins this Series, although our emotional interest will be with the Rays as a formerly small-market, currently small-payroll team who lost the Fall Classic in 2008 and 2020 to big-market, big-payroll clubs. Yet what this all means in the end is that the winner will serve as “ammunition” for those opposing a salary cap in the sport in the upcoming CBA negotiations. And that’s too bad, because in cities like Pittsburgh, there needs to be some hope for the future glories.
