The best pitcher in baseball led the best team to victory over the second-best team? Weird.

A World Series that makes the logical feel novel began on Friday as the Milwaukee Brewers beat the Tampa Bay Rays 3-2 in Game 1. Of course the Brewers, with their MLB-topping 103 regular-season victories, should be facing the 98-win Rays on the grandest stage. But of course, since these are two of the smallest and lowest-budget franchises in the sport, they shouldn’t.

That this best-of-seven title decider is at once a shocking cold shower and a comforting warm bath is largely explained by the absence of the two-time defending champions, the Los Angeles Dodgers, who were swept 4-0 by the Brewers in the National League Championship Series.

Best-of-seven series. All times US Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).

*-if necessary

In the US, all World Series games will air on Fox and Fox Deportes, with streaming available through Fox One. In the UK, the series will be carried by TNT Sports. In Australia, fans can watch on ESPN, with streaming available through Disney+ and Kayo Sports.

That was a philosophical battle with a drop-mic ending: the revenge of the nerds. Analytics over affluence, a triumph for the teams who scrimp and strategize rather than simply lobbing money at the best free agents each offseason.

The Dodgers have parlayed financial dominance into winning the National League West division in 13 of the past 14 years. At the start of this season there was every reason to expect they would win their third World Series in succession. But instead of spending this title fight lamenting the Dodgers’ dominance and fretting that money has made baseball dull and dynastic, we have the first match-up in 46 years – and second since 1920 – between two teams that have never won a World Series.

A country where the world’s richest person has reportedly made political donations in excess of $442m in this election cycle is culturally conditioned to believe that wealth wins. Yet baseball is, after all, still a sport where the won-lost standings and the salary tracker are not fully interchangeable.

Here are successful teams, boasting talents as luminous as Rays third baseman Junior Caminero and Brewers catcher William Contreras, with payrolls less than half the size of the most lavish spenders. Milwaukee’s annual outlay ($146m according to Spotrac) ranks 19th in the 30-team league with Tampa Bay ($96m) in 28th position. And the Rays reached this point by beating the Cleveland Guardians, who have MLB’s smallest payroll, in the American League Championship Series.

Only the Dodgers, Brewers, Atlanta Braves and New York Yankees have more regular-season wins in the 2020s than the Rays, who are in their third World Series. Tampa Bay, founded as an expansion franchise in 1998, reached the final in 2008 (where they lost to the Philadelphia Phillies) and in the Covid-wracked 2020 season, losing to the Dodgers at the makeshift site of Globe Life Field in Texas.

The Brewers’ only other World Series appearance was a loss to the St Louis Cardinals in 1982. Though there are suspicions that national television audiences will be meager for a series between small-market teams lacking superstars, the games in Milwaukee are some of the hottest tickets in World Series history. On one resale site the asking price for standing-room only tickets to Saturday’s Game 2 in Milwaukee was north of $3,000.

The first clash held moderate value for the neutral spectator. It was a night with a fast start, a false finish and some messy, unmemorable baseball in the middle. Where ordinary pitchers throw fastballs, Jacob Misiorowski, MLB’s strikeout leader in the regular season, hurls fireballs. Pitching on 11 days’ rest, the 24-year-old started his night with the quickest pitch ever recorded in a World Series, a 103.5mph screamer to leadoff hitter Yandy Díaz.

Misiorowski surrendered one run in five innings’ of work. “Not perfect, but good enough to get a win,” he said. Milwaukee led 3-1 after the seventh but Tampa Bay mounted a late rally, scoring a run in the ninth to induce a tense, if gauche, finish. The visitors loaded the bases but catcher Liam Hicks appeared to hit into a game-ending double play. The Brewers celebrated but the fireworks and high-fives were premature.

The Rays challenged the decision, which was overturned on review. This confirmed that shortstop Cooper Pratt had taken his foot off second base too early as he threw to first, and also that Milwaukee fans can boo almost as loudly as they cheer.

Still, there was more than enough air left in the lungs of the fans at American Family Field to reboot the celebrations after the teams returned to the field and closer Trevor Megill struck out outfielder Jonny DeLuca for the win, for real. “It’s a big credit to Trev for locking back in right there and making some huge pitches after. You know, you kind of have that emotional dump and then you have to get back on it.” Brewers slugger Christian Yelich told Fox Sports. It was perhaps early evidence that in a series that is likely to be decided by fine margins, Milwaukee’s formidable bullpen might ultimately make the difference.

Pat Murphy, the Brewers manager and Bruce Springsteen superfan who was FaceTimed by The Boss in midweek, declared Contreras the “player of the game” after he drove in a run and threw out two attempted base-stealers, neutralizing a key strategy for Kevin Cash’s aggressive Rays.

“Money isn’t everything” is a nice narrative as far as the action goes, but the peculiar genius of American sports is how they generally preserve parity and uncertainty on the field while embracing rapacious capitalism.

Three years ago, the Brewers, who are owned by Mark Attansio, a Los Angeles-based investor who also controls Norwich City FC and has an estimated net worth of $2bn, managed to squeeze $500m out of lawmakers in taxpayer-funded upgrades for a 25-year-old ballpark that cost less than $400m to build in the first place.

A high-stakes financial duel engulfing the entire league played out to gaggles of reporters before the game as two power-brokers dug in to entrenched positions near the first-base dug-out. Bruce Meyer, the interim head of the players’ union, called the owners’ proposal of a salary cap a “nuclear bomb” and - more reasonably - argued that the presence of two small-market clubs in this year’s World Series proves that competitive balance is possible without a cap. Meanwhile, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred broadened the context as he made the case for a limit: “It’s been 40 years since we’re here. Once every 40 years is not enough. It’s not that no small market can win, it’s just that it’s pretty rare.”

Milwaukee has a retractable roof, and Tampa Bay an indoor dome, but storm clouds are gathering above all the same. The owners are virtually certain to lock out the players on 1 December in a row over money that will threaten the start of the 2027 season. So this is a sport freighted with growing anxiety about the future, even during its showpiece event. Perhaps this, as well as the novelty factor of the match-up, is amplifying the party atmosphere of the last spectacle before the stoppage.