When the Milwaukee Brewers finished their NLCS sweep of the Los Angeles Dodgers on Thursday night, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred may have found himself scrambling for the Advil®. The Brew Crew’s 6-4 series clincher in Game 4 effectively kicked the legs out from under Manfred’s thesis that MLB requires a salary cap, as one of the league’s most spendthrift clubs has been extinguished by a small-market franchise with a relatively frugal $146.2 million payroll, per Spotrac data.
Just as the purchase of a 300-count bottle of ibuprofen implies a decidedly ambiguous outlook on life—on the one hand, the buyer anticipates a future in which he or she is plagued by headaches; on the other, the active ingredient in Advil® represents deliverance from said pain—so too would the 2026 World Series seem to portend a mixed bag of payoffs. Milwaukee will face either the skinflints in Tampa ($95.6 million) or Cleveland ($74.5 million) in the Fall Classic.
Unless you’re a Dodgers fan, the impending battle between two lean/mean operations repping middle-tier media markets is the best thing to happen to baseball since the invention of the athletic cup. And as much as the naysayers will insist that Fox is about to take one on the chin, there is evidence to suggest that a World Series free of New York and L.A. may draw a big TV crowd, provided the season closes out with to a six- or seven-game coda.
While there’s not a ton of data to support the notion that the Brewers can boost the Nielsen ratings in October, the inherent potential of a slump-busting matchup is hard to overstate. Milwaukee’s been thirsting for a title since its launch 57 years ago, and the club’s lone World Series appearance to date was a [wall]banger. In 1982, Harvey Kuenn’s squad went the distance with Whitey Herzog’s St. Louis Cardinals, and that rollercoaster still stands as the fifth most-watched MLB title tilt on the books.
NBC averaged 38.07 million viewers over the course of those seven broadcasts, with the deciding game scaring up just shy of 50 million viewers. Since then, Milwaukee has had to watch the action from the bleachers, but if Fox’s deliveries for Game 1 of this year’s NLCS are any indication, Americans would seem to have a hankering for these underdogs. Per Nielsen, the Brewers’ 2-1 victory on Oct. 11 averaged 10.72 million viewers, marking the biggest audience for an NLCS opener in 21 years.
Fans demonstrably enjoy watching long-suffering teams finally put their demons to rest, as was made evident by the heroically entertaining 2016 World Series. On one side of the diamond there stood the cursed Chicago Cubs, who were desperate to get a 108-year-old monkey off their backs. Opposite the Cubbies were a Cleveland squad that had waited 67 seasons to hoist the hardware, having last quaffed the victory beers in 1948. (The Indians’ 4-2 win over the Boston Braves was only the second televised World Series in history; such was the state of sports media rights in that long-ago era that the games were carried by each of the four extant broadcasters. One of them was the DuMont Television Network, which: go ask your great-grandpa.)
Everything about that 2016 series was electrifying, so it seemed fitting that the battle would be decided in bonus cantos. Chicago’s 8-7 extra-inning victory averaged 40.05 million viewers, giving Fox bragging rights to the most-watched MLB game in 25 years. All told, the Cubs-Indians slate averaged 22.85 million viewers, making it the most-eyeballed World Series since the Boston Red Sox expunged their own longstanding “curse” in 2004. If nothing else, there is ample data to suggest that people really enjoy watching baseball teams pull a Father Karras.
If the power of redemption isn’t enough to compel you into believing that curse-busting equals ratings gold, a deeper dive into the archives may do the trick. In 1995, Cleveland helped wash the bad taste of the canceled ’94 season out of millions of mouths by way of a six-game showdown with the Atlanta Braves. With an average TV turnout of 28.97 million viewers in alternating broadcasts on ABC and NBC, the series out-delivered the following year’s Braves-Yankees duel by some 3.75 million fans per night.
Cleveland a bigger draw than New York? Will wonders never cease?
While Tampa’s a much larger market—its 2.28 million TV homes make it the 11th largest DMA in the U.S., whereas Cleveland-Akron (1.56 million) is ranked 20th—the extent of the Guardians’ drought very likely gives them the edge over the Rays in terms of potential audience deliveries. Tampa doesn’t have a robust national following, and its two appearances coincide with some of the least-watched World Series on the books.
Of course, one of the Rays’ Fall Classics is practically staggering under the weight of an asterisk. Following the COVID-blighted 2020 campaign, in which the regular season was whittled down to a rudimentary 60-game slate, the Rays’ loss to the Dodgers managed just 9.82 million viewers, making it MLB’s second least-viewed title series on record. Only the 2023 Rangers-Diamondbacks slog was the subject of less overall curiosity, and that five-game set was almost wholly devoid of suspense.
Tampa’s first shot at the crown was also a bit of a bust, as that five-game loss to the Phillies managed well under 14 million viewers per game. Clearly, advertisers would be better served by a Brewers-Guardians pairing, but as always, Fox is mostly rooting for a full seven-frame set.
The relative tininess of the Milwaukee market—956,350 TV households lie within the bounds of the Cream City DMA, which works out to 0.75% of the total U.S. base—may be largely offset by fans’ desire to see a lifelong drought come to an end. So as much as Fox will be denied another crack at a Yankees-Dodgers juggernaut, the impending meeting of two small-fry clubs should still attract a healthy crowd … provided the AL contender manages to wrest the brooms out of the Brewers’ mitts. Milwaukee has the chance to serve up one of the great American redemption arcs, and while it’s sad that Bob Uecker won’t be on hand to cheer on his Brewers, a whole lot of us will be hollering in front of our screens in the weeks to come.
A Brewers-Guardians or Brewers-Rays finale would seem to undermine MLB’s ambitions to force a salary cap down the players’ throats, but even Rob Manfred may have a hard time wiping the grin off his mug if a clash between two small-market penny-pinchers goes a full seven games. If the prospect doesn’t spark joy in the commish, there may be something inside his head that even Advil® can’t fix.