The Milwaukee Brewers and Tampa Bay Rays are set to play the smallest-market World Series in two decades.
According to a USA TODAY analysis of Nielsen’s 2026-27 designated market area estimates, the two teams’ home markets combine for just 3.24 million television households.
That total is slightly larger than the 2006 World Series between the Detroit Tigers and St. Louis Cardinals, whose markets combined for 3.22 million television households. The 2006 matchup itself is the smallest since the Cardinals faced the Minnesota Twins in 1987.
The upcoming matchup has already raised concerns about television ratings. USA TODAY Sports columnist Bob Nightengale warned that the two small-market teams could produce one of the least-watched World Series in history.
“Obviously, on the margins, that hurts, right?” Victor Matheson, a professor at Holy Cross who studies sports economics, told USA TODAY. “Because again, you're likely to have bigger viewership numbers in the towns that are playing.”
After the 2006 and 2026 matchups, the next-smallest in that 20-year span was the 2014 World Series between the Kansas City Royals and San Francisco Giants. That series had a combined market of 3.67 million.
Every other series between 2006 and 2026 has featured larger combined markets, the biggest being the 2024 World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees that had a combined television household total of 13.8 million.
How small are the Brewers' and Rays' TV markets?
The Rays’ previous World Series against the Dodgers in 2020 was the seventh largest since 2006. But pairing Tampa Bay with Milwaukee – the smallest MLB market – produces one of the smallest combined markets in decades.
The Brewers last reached the World Series in 1982, when they faced the Cardinals. With St. Louis having a television market of 1.28 million, that series barely eclipsed 2 million households by 2026 figures.
Milwaukee ranks as the 39th largest television market in the U.S. by Nielsen with an estimated 960,000 homes having a TV.
The Rays’ Tampa-St. Petersburg market, meanwhile, is over twice as large at 2.28 million and is 11th nationwide.
But Matheson said smaller markets can have an advantage of their own: pent-up demand. While fans in Los Angeles have enjoyed several recent World Series appearances, the Brewers haven’t reached the Fall Classic since their seven-game loss to St. Louis in 1982.
For fans in Milwaukee, Matheson said, the chance to see their team win its first championship could feel like a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” which could potentially drive greater local interest despite the city’s small population.
That logic could apply to the Rays as well, as Tampa Bay is also searching for their first title, although it has made the World Series three times now in the past 20 years.
Other factors can come into play, too. For instance, star power like Brewers ace Jacob Misiorowski could draw eyeballs that might otherwise tune out.
Do bigger markets mean more World Series viewers?
Yet despite natural concerns about a small-market World Series, the size of the participating teams' television markets has shown little relationship with how many people watch.
Indeed, the most-viewed World Series since 2000 had fewer than 4 million combined households – when the Boston Red Sox ended its 86-year curse by sweeping St. Louis in 2004.
A tighter correlation may be found when the series was played; World Series viewership has generally declined since 2000, meaning that modern editions have a tougher hill to climb.
“There's a million things people can do now that they couldn't a generation or two ago,” Matheson said. “In the old days, we only had three channels on TV when I was growing up.”
The 2023 matchup between the Texas Rangers and Arizona Diamondbacks, which averaged just over nine million viewers per game – the lowest in World Series history – highlights that decline.
Matheson cautioned that if this year’s edition draws a similarly small audience, the Brewers’ and Rays’ home markets wouldn’t necessarily be the only reason. The increasingly fragmented television landscape could also play a role.
Regardless, Milwaukee and Tampa Bay can’t increase the size of their markets. But they do have something a ratings projection can’t measure: the chance to give baseball fans a championship story worth watching.
Methodology: USA TODAY obtained estimated television households for MLB markets from Nielsen Media Research. Toronto's market size came from Canadian audience measurement organization Numeris, which estimated 3.23 million households with TV access in the Toronto/Hamilton market for 2026-27. World Series viewership averages for 2000-25 were compiled by Nielsen and obtained via Baseball Almanac. For consistency, the same 2026-27 market estimates were applied to every historical matchup.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: The World Series is getting a small-market showdown. Does size matter?