As far as World Series go, this year’s is rather quaint. The Milwaukee Brewers, of the National League, and the Tampa Bay Rays, of the American League, are what you might call low-interest draws: small-market franchises with tiny payrolls and old-school affectations, teams that delight in drag bunts and stolen bases, slap hits and infield singles. Even in the divisional and championship series, when it became clear that the Brewers and the Rays were fated for a date in the Fall Classic, pundits began calling a possible matchup between the two a “nightmare” scenario for Major League Baseball. Anthony Rizzo, the retired All-Star first baseman, said that such a series would be “fucking terrible” for the sport. (“Amazing,” he clarified, but “terrible.”) Milwaukee and Tampa Bay have the third-smallest combined television market of any World Series pairing in the modern era, and the two teams’ payrolls, added together, are nearly a hundred million dollars less than that of either the Mets or the Dodgers. In other words: Would anyone outside of the state of Wisconsin and the Tampa Bay area watch these games? Would the casual baseball fan stand in awe of the Brewers’ baby-faced ace, Jacob Misiorowski, or fawn over the Rays’ braces-bearing young slugger, Junior Caminero? Such anxieties dominated press coverage of the World Series before it began, on Friday. It was almost enough to overshadow the fact that these were the best teams in baseball, each fighting for their franchise’s first-ever World Series title.

Game One started out hot. On the mound for Milwaukee was Misiorowski, a beanstalk of a pitcher whose fastball routinely exceeds a hundred and three miles per hour. In the regular season, he led the league in strikeouts and earned-run average, but he had recently shown signs of fallibility, struggling in the playoffs against the San Diego Padres and the Los Angeles Dodgers, his fastball noticeably less crisp than usual. Early on, the Rays tested him. Yandy Díaz, their lead-off hitter, flicked an opposite-field fly ball to the warning track, just barely missing a home run. Jonathan Aranda singled, and the speedy Chandler Simpson slapped a base hit down the left-field line. Caminero—the series’ lone long-ball-hitting behemoth—lasered a ball to third, which the Brewers’ David Hamilton snagged in the air and flipped to second for a double play to end the inning. Misiorowski walked off the mound unscathed, but damage had been done. He’d need some run support to escape with a win, and, luckily, his offense provided it. After a Jackson Chourio lead-off single, Christian Yelich laced a triple into the gap to give Milwaukee an early lead. William Contreras followed with a single, making it 2–0. Who said it would be a boring series? The retractable roof in Milwaukee rattled with roars.

Then came innings of quiet. Both pitchers settled into the game, and the offenses stalled. Strikeouts, pop-ups, and, yes, a few sacrifice bunts. The Brewers and the Rays play an attritional brand of baseball. They grind out at-bats, put the ball in play, and hustle hard down the line. (“I wish we played like them,” one rival general manager told ESPN, referring to the Brewers.) Still, this was, in part, what all those pundits were worried about. Would the average viewer want to watch a bloodbath of small-ball hermeneutics? Caminero, finally, gave the crowd something to watch. In the top of the fourth, he belted a double over the outstretched glove of Garrett Mitchell, the Brewers’ center fielder; a batter later, the Rays scratched across their first run. It would be their only score until the top of the ninth, when a Brewers’ game-ending double play was overturned on a coach’s challenge, and the Rays plated a run on the miscue: 3–2 ballgame, two outs in the ninth, runners on second and third. The Milwaukee reliever Trevor Megill was unphased; he struck out Jonny DeLuca on a diving knuckle curve, shouting in joy as fireworks skittered into the domed sky.

What do we want from a World Series? Or, maybe more existentially, what do we want from baseball? The sport has seemed to be in a perpetual state of crisis for as long as I’ve been alive: labor disputes, performance-enhancing-drug and sign-stealing scandals, widening payroll disparities, the complicated intrusion of sabermetrics, declining television ratings, games that take five hours to finish. Somewhere along the line, the national pastime, as it were, lost its grip on the American imagination. And what, or who, was to blame? The M.L.B. cracked down on steroid use, punished teams accused of cheating, and added measures to speed up the pace of play, instituting a pitch clock and limiting mound visits and pickoff attempts. Perhaps because of these interventions, baseball has enjoyed a recent surge of renewed enthusiasm. The past two World Series—between the Dodgers and the Yankees, in 2024, and, last year, between the Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays—saw a spike in ratings, and a more inspired cultural reception. I’m prone to thinking it’s the stars: tuning into a Dodgers game means watching Shohei Ohtani, the greatest ballplayer to ever live, play alongside future Hall of Famers Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, and Clayton Kershaw. The Yankees’ run to the World Series, in 2024, saw them trot out a revamped murderers’ row of Aaron Judge, Juan Soto, and Giancarlo Stanton. These were titans of the home run, outlandish talents whose bats looked like toothpicks in their hands. Maybe it was the cities they played for, too, the major metropolitan areas that made the pageantry feel that much more grandiose. You didn’t need to understand what OPS or WHIP meant when you watched last year’s Game Seven masterpiece between the Dodgers and the Blue Jays. You just needed to behold the go-ahead home runs and diving grabs from the stars whose names even your co-workers knew.

But this concentration of top-level talent in the league’s biggest markets has beget another apparent crisis for baseball. Unlike the other major American sports, the M.L.B. imposes no cap on team spending, making it so that monoliths like the Los Angeles clubs can shell out several times as much for their players than smaller budget teams like, say, the Brewers or the Rays. Ohtani, of the Dodgers, earns about three times as much annually as the entire Rays starting lineup; Juan Soto, of the Mets, makes roughly the same as the Brewers’ nine-man group. Mark Attanasio, the Brewers owner, is one of the many team governors who believes a salary cap “not only will help us compete, but more importantly all of the teams with lower payrolls, too,” as he argued at a recent press conference. With the league’s collective-bargaining agreement set to expire in December, owners like Attanasio will contend that a revised revenue-sharing system will promote parity and level the playing field, whereas the players, represented by their union, are willing to strike—even for an entire season—if their billionaire bosses continue to insist on a salary cap. “The opportunity for players to get paid is what this is all about,” Bryce Harper, of the Philadelphia Phillies, said in July. Cody Bellinger, of the Yankees, put it more pointedly: “If the billionaires are wanting it, they’re billionaires for a reason.” He went on, “They want to continue to enhance their portfolio as much as possible. Us players understand that.”

It can certainly be argued that the Dodgers are bastardizing baseball’s competitive balance, gleefully outbidding every team during free agency because, well, they can afford to. (This was once the domain of the Yankees, who, compared with the Dodgers, now seem thrifty.) Their big-money strategy has undoubtedly worked: they have won three of the past six World Series, and will likely be contenders for years to come. But spending money is not a surefire path to success. The Los Angeles Angels have repeatedly lapsed into losing seasons despite doling out huge contracts to big-name free agents, and the San Francisco Giants have suffered several consecutive below-five-hundred seasons after investing in a slurry of high-priced talent. (I’ll spare you, Mets fans—finishing last in the N.L. East, with the highest payroll in baseball, surely hurts enough.) Baseball rosters are large and unwieldy; the margins between success and failure are slim and hard to control for. There is no equivalent to a LeBron James shaping every possession of an N.B.A. Finals game, or a Tom Brady dictating his team’s every offensive drive. Baseball is an ensemble game, a wildly erratic sport to predict. As Roger Angell wrote, for The New Yorker, in 2011, the sport “always remains a fraction beyond our reach.” An extra left-hander in the bullpen might determine whether a team advances in the playoffs; a scrawny kid taken in the twenty-fifth round of the M.L.B. draft, earning the league-minimum salary, might make a game-saving play in the World Series. After the Brewers swept the Dodgers in the National League Championship Series, the Milwaukee manager Pat Murphy said, in a postgame interview, that the Dodgers “may have a bunch of Hall of Famers, but we have a bunch of gamers.” Because that’s how baseball goes, doesn’t it? Slumps and funks come for everyone, and a five-foot-nine right fielder for the Brewers named Sal Frelick might launch a home run in Game Two of the World Series to cap off a thrilling late-game comeback. Sometimes a sacrifice bunt and a sturdy bullpen can make up for hundreds of millions of dollars in salary disparity. Sometimes the money only takes you so far.

The Brewers and the Rays aren’t all scrappy have-nots, however. Their rosters are the products of shrewd trades and rigorous international scouting, wise draft picks that paid dividends years after they were made. The Brewers had begun scouting their best offensive player, Jackson Chourio, by the time he was a fourteen-year-old living in Venezuela, signing him to an eight-year, eighty-two-million-dollar contract before he even reached the majors. That now looks like a sweetheart deal—a coup for the Brewers. Or take Caminero, whom the Rays acquired in an afterthought of a trade with the Cleveland Guardians a few years back. Call it luck that he became one of the best hitters in the sport, or call it astonishing scouting; probably both, but I’ll prioritize the latter. The Rays have the third-most wins in the American League since 2017, despite consistently operating with one of its lowest payrolls. About half their current roster was new to the team at the start of this season. It’s no surprise that their scouting department has developed a reputation as being soothsayers, almost mystical in their ability to spot a no-name prospect’s potential long before anyone else does.

Maybe one day in the not-so-distant future, Caminero and Chourio will play for the Dodgers or Yankees. By that point, the Rays and the Brewers will have likely developed a new crop of prospects to replace them, guys who make pennies compared with the game’s highest-paid players. Or maybe not. Maybe talents like Misiorowski and Caminero and Chourio only come around once every couple decades. Enjoy them while you have them, I guess, and win with them while you can—they may not be around for long, and World Series rings don’t come easy.

Milwaukee is making the most of the opportunity. On Saturday night, during Game Two, the Rays looked poised to even the series, taking an early 4–0 lead in the top half of the first inning, but the Brewers clawed and elbowed their way back into the game, one run at a time, as they had all season. They’d trailed in every game against the Dodgers, in the N.L.C.S., and still swept them. When they finally took the lead against the Rays, in the seventh, on the twenty-two-year-old Cooper Pratt’s single, it felt like a knockout punch; their closer, Aaron Ashby, hadn’t allowed a run all post-season, and that didn’t change on Saturday night. Perhaps these Brewers aren’t some small-market darling, after all. Two games away from their first World Series title, they seem about as fearsome as any team could possibly hope to be. ♦