Back in March, as the first pitches were being thrown and as the first hot dogs were just being unwrapped, the 2026 Major League Baseball season started under the assumption that it would be the final one before contentious labor negotiations in the winter.
“A lockout is all but guaranteed at the end of the agreement,” Bruce Meyer, the acting executive director of the MLB Players Association, said in February. “The league has pretty much said that.”
We’re now in October, and this year’s World Series matchup between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Milwaukee Brewers is equally intriguing for what it means on the field (the series will literally decide a champion, after all) as for what it means off the field, as terms such as “market size,” “payroll” and “revenue sharing” have become as big a part of baseball as hits, home runs and RBIs.
Here’s what to think about as you watch the Fall Classic unfold.
These are low-spending teams
For all the concerns about payroll disparity in MLB headed into the season, this World Series features two of the lowest-spending teams in the sport.
The Brewers rank 19th in payroll this season, according to FanGraphs. The Rays rank 28th. Their roughly combined salaries — in the neighborhood of $232 million — would still rank lower than eight other ballclubs.
And both the Brewers and the Rays had to go through high spenders to make it to the World Series. Milwaukee swept the Los Angeles Dodgers and their $412 million team in the NLCS, while Tampa Bay topped the New York Yankees and their $310 million payroll in the ALDS.
As a result, we have a championship matchup featuring two teams in the bottom half of MLB payrolls for the first time since 1991, according to The Associated Press.
(It should be noted that the Rays aren’t necessarily a small-market team even if they don’t spend. Tampa-St. Petersburg is the 11th-biggest television market in the U.S., according to Nielsen.)
Still, this year’s World Series winner will be the first bottom-half spender since the 2015 Kansas City Royals — a rebuke of sorts to what MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred had to say about the sport this year.
“In order for this game to reach its full potential, we need to continue to address concerns that our fans have, particularly concerns that go to the core of what we’re about — that is, competitive balance,” Manfred said in July. “We need to make sure that fans in markets at the beginning of the season have a realistic belief that their team has a chance to win.”
Manfred made the comments amid an ongoing push to institute a salary cap, which MLB has been aggressively pursuing as it claims payroll is correlated to performance. (A claim that’s somewhat in dispute.)
But the players union, unsurprisingly, views the World Series matchup as another example of the sport’s working just fine.
“It’s further evidence that the league’s purported ‘competitive balance’ justification for a salary cap holds no water,” Meyer told NBC News in a statement. “But that’s never been the real reason why they want a salary cap. They want it to juice their profits and franchise values.”
Will people watch?
Given the small-market haze surrounding this matchup, inevitably there will be online discourse about the television ratings for the World Series. Will fan interest dip because these aren’t marquee teams? Combined viewership for this year’s ALCS and NLCS was up slightly over last year, according to Nielsen.
The last two World Series, both of which featured the Dodgers, plus the Yankees and the Toronto Blue Jays, averaged over 15 million viewers, the most since 2017. Tampa’s first World Series berth in 2008 averaged 13 million viewers and was the lowest-rated series in history at the time. Its 2020 appearance played during Covid, and the Dodgers-Rays series drew an average audience of 9.8 million, which remains the second-smallest average all time, per Nielsen figures.
Market size has seemed to have an effect on Milwaukee and Tampa Bay during the playoffs. The Rays drew 3.7 million viewers against the Cleveland Guardians after having drawn 4 million against the Yankees, per Nielsen. The Brewers and the San Diego Padres drew only 2.6 million viewers in the Division Series, while Milwaukee vs. Los Angeles was seen by 7.9 million people a night.
Wait, are these teams even good?
Yes, they are! This isn’t a fluke matchup based on the randomness of the postseason, as the Brewers and the Rays finished at the top of their leagues during the regular season. And how both teams made it this far is a feat unto itself.
Every MLB team wants to scout prospects well, but doing it consistently is vital for penny-pinchers such as Milwaukee and Tampa Bay.
“They just don’t have a lot of margin for error,” said a senior executive who oversees scouting for an MLB team, who wasn’t permitted to speak publicly. “And yet, the $80 or $90 million payrolls are in the World Series, and the $400 million ones are on the sideline.”
That’s thanks to the ways Milwaukee and Tampa have compensated for their lack of spending power.
The Brewers and the Rays have strong Latin American scouting systems, but they rely on slightly different approaches to scouting.
“Tampa is more scout-friendly with an analytic backbone, while Milwaukee is very analytic-driven, more than a scout-driven process, in selecting their players,” the executive said.
Their limited budgets also have required both to identify which castoffs elsewhere could become valuable contributors. Milwaukee first baseman Andrew Vaughn is a 28-year-old former No. 3 overall pick, while 31-year-old Jake Bauers, who is on his fifth team, has driven in six runs this postseason.
The teams also have found a knack for knowing when to trade players to maximize their returns. (In one case, though, the Brewers traded pitcher Freddy Peralta to the Mets last offseason; Peralta was later traded to Tampa, where he was named MVP of the ALCS.)
Ultimately, whoever wins the World Series will merely be setting the stage for an offseason that could have massive ramifications for the sport. Expect both MLB and the players to use the result in some fashion. Enjoy the games while you can.