usatoday
There is no way for Major League Baseball to obscure the reality of this year's World Series. The Milwaukee Brewers and Tampa Bay Rays are facing off, directly contradicting the claim that small-market teams are hopeless and require intervention from Commissioner Rob Manfred and the league's wealthy owners.
The timing is particularly awkward, arriving just six weeks before Manfred is expected to impose a lockout that would halt the sport during a period of relative prosperity. Attendance is up, playoff access has expanded, and networks and streaming services are eager to pay billions for broadcast rights when the league's TV deals expire in two years.
Instead, for the second time in five years, fans will endure a winter without transactions, trades, or the hope of seeing their teams emulate the Brewers, Rays, Cleveland Guardians, or Los Angeles Dodgers.
Those were the final four teams this autumn, and three of them come from lower-revenue markets—a fact that might surprise the league's focus groups.
It will be Milwaukee versus Tampa Bay in the World Series. The Dodgers can join the Yankees, Phillies, and Mets at a luxurious resort in Cancun.
For those who follow the game closely, this October—and the season as a whole—reinforced certain truths. Most notably, spending on payroll helps but guarantees nothing. A clever front office is insufficient without an ownership group that fosters a creative, supportive culture. That is perhaps the main reason certain teams contend repeatedly, with the Brewers a prime example.
The spin is already starting, and it will continue until Dec. 1 and beyond: the 2026 World Series winner will be dismissed as an aberration, the first true small-market champion since the 2015 Kansas City Royals. Just two in 12 seasons. That looks bad—technically, yes.
But since we are now in Arbitrary Endpoints Season, consider another number: World Series appearances since 2008. The Dodgers have five pennants. The Houston Astros have four, and in both of their championship years their payroll ranked outside the top 10. Then there is a group of franchises that suggests parity. Three-time league champions since 2008: Tampa Bay, Texas, Philadelphia, San Francisco. Two-timers: St. Louis, Kansas City, Boston, and the New York Yankees. Indeed, both Missouri teams have made as many World Series appearances since 2008 as the vaunted Yankees and Red Sox.
Milwaukee, Arizona, Atlanta, Washington, the Chicago Cubs, Cleveland, the New York Mets, and Detroit have each made one Fall Classic appearance in the past 19 seasons. That is 19 of 30 teams, with 12 franchises winning World Series titles. Is there really a problem?
Here is a crucial phrase to examine: the league insists it must provide greater competitive opportunities to small-market teams. A more accurate term might be low-revenue teams. What exactly is a small market? Is it Miami, because the Marlins have made one brief playoff appearance since 2003? Or is that a Marlins problem, given that Miami ranks 18th in market size and eighth when including the adjacent West Palm Beach market? Is it Pittsburgh, since the Pirates have not won a division title since 1993 and owner Bob Nutting cannot seem to pay a free agent more than $39 million? Or is that a Nutting problem, since Pittsburgh ranks one spot above San Diego in market size, and the Padres have been both competitive and prosperous, signing marquee players to big contracts and making the playoffs in five of the past seven years? Is it Tampa Bay, which has long overachieved through intelligence and resourcefulness? Tampa-St. Petersburg is technically the 11th-largest market in the country, between Boston and Phoenix. Certainly, the Bay area's geography, with bodies of water dividing the population, has hurt the Rays' revenue, but a favorable stadium deal in Tampa should alleviate many of those issues.
It must be acknowledged that Milwaukee and Cincinnati are quite small—the only current MLB markets with fewer than 1 million TV households, according to Nielsen. Yet the Brewers and Reds also demonstrate that competence and desire matter nearly as much as revenue. The Brewers have made the playoffs in eight of the past nine years, while the Reds mock their fans by suggesting they have no choice but to watch a below-average product.
There simply are not many small-market teams. This is the big leagues. There are no Mayberrys. But for the sake of argument, let us group the four smallest markets—Kansas City, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and Las Vegas (a self-inflicted wound the league gladly endorsed)—into a special category. That is just four of 30 teams, or 13%. If Milwaukee wins the World Series, that would be two truly small-market champions in a 19-season sample. That is 10.5%. Not exactly hopeless.
Is that gap in access worth overhauling MLB's salary structure and jeopardizing the 2027 season for a salary cap? It would be far better to recognize that the Royals, Reds, Athletics, and Brewers are outliers, just as the Dodgers, Yankees, Mets, and Phillies are. The broader range of championships, pennants, and playoff berths over the past two decades has been claimed by what might be called normal markets and franchises—San Francisco and Houston, Atlanta and Dallas-Fort Worth, Washington and Boston. None of those teams have blown up the game's salary structure. They rarely exceed the luxury tax threshold by much and usually dip back under it soon after. They can splurge on free agents, win a World Series, and then retreat for six years if they wish. Their successes and failures are relatively cyclical—the nature of competition in a free market, one might say.
That is not to say there are no problems. The lavish spending of the Dodgers and Mets, led by two billionaires with boundary-pushing reputations, rightly raises eyebrows. In the last collective bargaining agreement, the league and the union agreed to what was informally called the Cohen Tax, a fourth level of luxury tax designed to penalize extreme spenders like the Mets' owner. He said he would blow past it, and he did. Dodgers owner Mark Walter soon followed.
This is a baseball problem that mirrors a societal one: extreme income inequality. In this arena, it is the 0.1% creating the impression that the game is rigged, even if Juan Soto cannot stay off the injured list and Kyle Tucker looked lost in his first season in Los Angeles. Yet baseball has about $13 billion circulating annually. This is a problem it can remedy; a solution is already partly in place as luxury tax penalties go toward player benefits and, to some extent, revenue sharing.
If the Dodgers are ruining baseball while teams like the Brewers watch helplessly as their best players leave—never mind that Christian Yelich is a Brewer for life and Jackson Chourio and Cooper Pratt are locked up long-term—simply eliminate the middleman. Create another tax threshold, perhaps called the Bezos Tax, in case he decides to enter the game. Funnel that money directly to whatever MLB calls small markets. And stipulate that the money must be spent on retaining or acquiring players. Because currently, revenue-sharing recipients have significant leeway in how they spend their welfare checks. Somehow it never shows up at the major league level—or perhaps they are serving their minor leaguers caviar every night.
And if fans worry about their teams losing favorite players, they should look at the NBA. There, the once-champion Celtics just traded beloved Jaylen Brown, bringing 6-year-olds to tears. Where the Thunder methodically built what looked like a budding dynasty, only to be forced to trade three rotation players from their championship team for cap reasons even as a $1 billion taxpayer-funded arena rises in Oklahoma City. Where the New York Knicks won their first championship since 1973 but are now closer to a breakup than a repeat. Where four of the past eight NBA Finals MVPs changed teams in a three-week span this summer. That is the other side of the salary cap that fans might not consider. And it would affect every franchise, especially considering that for all the star power on the Dodgers' roster, it is often the Kik Hernándezs, Will Smiths, and Alex Vesias who resonate as much as Ohtani with some fans.
Naturally, fans answered yes when MLB asked if they favored competitive balance. But they should also be asked: Does your owner actually care about winning? Is your front office and executive leadership competent? Would you be willing to bid farewell to some favorite players in the name of cap space? In the coming months, there will be plenty of talk about how a cap is the only way to make things fair. Yet we still have Milwaukee versus Tampa Bay ahead of us. Enjoy the games. It should be a great Series, even if TV ratings may not reflect it. And it might be the last game for a while, unless the league loses the actual labor war as swiftly as it lost the narrative.
Originally reported by usatoday.