So, who had Milwaukee versus Tampa Bay in the series? You could have had this prop for 20-1 odds on Fanduel apparently, despite the fact that Milwaukee ran away with the NL Central and had the best record in the sport, and despite the fact that Tampa was easily the best team in the AL and topped a division with 3 of the 6 highest payrolls in the sport.
For the 6th time in the last decade, the World Series will feature the team with the best regular season records, which sounds like normalcy until you realize that the league went from 1990 to 2006 with this happening exactly once (the juggernaut 1998 New York Yankees team). It was incredibly rare for the best regular season team to even make it to the series thanks to divisional play, multiple playoff rounds, and wild card teams sneaking into the playoffs with 80-something wins but getting hot. In this respect, the trend of the best teams playing the best in October is great for the sport.
All credit to Milwaukee and Tampa Bay as well, building teams primarily through excellent player development and a focus on scouting instead of spending (self own here: i mistakenly referred to these teams as “tankers” in a previous comment; that’s not the case at all; they’re builders).
I find it the height of irony that the Brewers, so long associated with Bud Selig’s penurious leadership, made the playoffs exactly twice in his decades of ownership (he or his family ran the team from 1970 to 2005 and made the playoffs exactly two years in a row in 1981 and 1982), yet the new owners on a similar payroll have now made the playoffs basically a decade straight. I wonder what excuse Selig gives himself for decades of ineptitude, and what excuse other owners now have for their own franchises given what Milwaukee has been able to do. Despite being “good” for a decade, they continue to pull out quality players in the upper rounds of the draft and their roster is filled with home grown players and players acquired in trade; in fact if I’m reading Roster Resource correctly, their entire playoff roster features just one conventional Free Agent.
Tampa Bay’s long been known as one of the most shrewd front offices out there, and this is their 6th playoff appearance in the last 8 years. Their roster construction is less home grown and more based on wheeling and dealing. They have a slew of prospects acquired in trade over the past half decade who have grown into the team they are today. I challenged some semi-serious baseball fans of mine to name a single player on their starting lineup and/or their rotation and they could not. Neither could I. Perhaps their most “famous” player is uber former prospect Junior Caminiero, who was regularly in the top 5 of all minor league prospects up until the May 2024 timeframe when he matriculated. He led Tampa in bWAR this year and is just 22. The rotation is a hodge podge of 30-something veterans who have put together career years, and it’s hard to look at this roster and understand how they possibly won 98 games.
There’s a reason some teams hate trading with Tampa: they always look bad. Washington hasn’t made a trade with them since 2017, and the one relatively non-trivial trade we’ve ever made with them was the weird 3-team Trea Turner deal. We did trade them Nate Karns in 2014 for a couple of eventual fringe starters, and of course who can forget the Elijah Dukes trade, where Tampa dumped their problem child on us for a lefty reliever.
Who do I want to see win the Series? I’m not sure I have a rooting interest this year. Tampa’s never won, so that’d be a great story. Milwaukee certainly deserves it after a decade of success. So there’s that.
What does this mean for the sport, at this critical juncture in player-owner relations? I’m not sure it means anything, because the owners have been pitching their great ideas for months to get the fans on their side, and they’re quite quick to conveniently “forget” whatever news doesn’t agree with their salary cap-led worldview.. The owners want salary structure to manage costs, but now we have two teams in the series who’s combined payroll is only $250M, less than 8 other teams individually this year. I sense some owners will look at these teams and say, “why can’t I do that?” Why am I spending 9 figures on a 30-yr old Free agent when instead I can save that money and do what Milwaukee and Tampa (and Cleveland and the White Sox, both of whom also made the playoffs with the 28th and 29th ranked payrolls), and I just have to wonder … why spend that money if you don’t have to?
Yes, 7 of the top 11 payroll teams made the playoffs this year, which frankly is really the metric we should be looking at. Money doesn’t buy a World Series title, but what it generally does well is guarantee entry to the playoffs (in 2025, 6 of the 7 highest payrolls made the playoffs, and just like in 2026 7 of the top 11 made it as well).
Of course, you cannot just wave a magic wand and have a front office methodology that gets you a pennant winning team for the 28th ranked payroll. Certainly the Nats leadership thought they could repeat the “old” method of bottoming out and building up after the big 2021/2022 selloff. But the game has changed so much since the 2009-2012 timeframe when Rizzo pulled this off the first time; he never really focused on analytics or the international market like he should have,
Tangent kvetching on the state of our IFA department: the last time an IFA even made it to the majors for us was Andry Lara, signed in 2019, and the last “significant” IFA to play for us was either 2017’s Jose Ferrer or 2016’s Luis Garcia. Our DSL team went 14-40 this season, nearly the worst record in the league, and we’re one of the few remaining teams that only field one DSL team right now, a huge missed opportunity when 20+ teams now have two of them down in the DR. The Royals field two teams and they finished 1st and 3rd out of the 51 teams down there this season. You know who else fields two DSL teams? NYY, Tampa, Milwaukee, Cleveland … basically all the “smart” teams.