Baseball’s Beautiful Nightmare

Be careful what you wish for.

For years, the prevailing thought around Major League Baseball was that the deep- pocketed Los Angeles Dodgers were ruining baseball.

New York Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner publicly lamented the Dodgers’ spending when he said, "It's difficult for most of us owners to be able to do the kind of things that they're doing”. A few months later, Colorado Rockies owner Dick Monfort took things one step further when he added, “The competitive imbalance in baseball has gotten to the point of ludicrosity now”.

That fact that only four times since 2001 has the team with the biggest payroll gone on to win the World Series that season didn’t matter; the perception was that nobody could compete with the Dodgers and their bloated payroll. And given that Los Angeles had won back-to-back championships and was favored to three-peat in 2026, perception became reality.

As a result, Rob Manfred and Co. pushed a narrative that the game was fundamentally broken, and that the only way to fix the problem was to institute a salary cap and floor system designed to remedy the so-called competitive imbalance.

Major League Baseball, like the National Basketball Association and the National Football League, wanted its fans to know that parity was paramount for the league to survive. For baseball to flourish, the small-market teams had to be just as important as the large-market ones.

With that in mind, you’d think MLB would be ecstatic about a 2026 World Series matchup featuring the Tampa Bay Rays and the Milwaukee Brewers, right? Just a couple of small market franchises fighting the good fight. Tampa has the 28 th highest payroll in the league, while Milwaukee boasts the 19th . For context, the combined

payrolls of the Rays and Brewers is the lowest of any Fall Classic since the St. Louis Cardinals beat the Texas Rangers in 2011.This sort of showdown is exactly what baseball has been clamoring for the last few seasons.

Let’s see if Manfred is still singing that same tune two weeks from now.  

The 2024 and 2025 World Series – both featuring the ‘bad for baseball’ Dodgers – were the two most-watched World Series since 2017. Conversely, the 2023 World Series featuring the Texas Rangers and the Arizona Diamondbacks was the least-watched World Series on record. Needless to say, multiple media outlets are already projecting the Rays-Brewers World Series to challenge Rangers-D’Backs for ratings cellar supremacy.

Folks like to say that professional sports are all about competition, and while that may true on a fundamental level, the ugly truth is that they are money-making endeavors first and foremost. High-level sports are big business, and a World Series showdown between two superstar-less small market franchises is bad for business. 

The Brewers and Rays have been two of the winningest teams in all of baseball the past few seasons, but this is far from dream matchup. It’s more like a beautiful nightmare.