The World Series began last night for the 122nd time in 124 years. It actually turned out to be a pretty damn good baseball game, as the byline-shy ASSOCIATED PRESS reported just like they did for the majority of the previous 121:
Trevor Megill struck out Jonny DeLuca with runners on second and third to wiggle out of a ninth-inning jam as the Milwaukee Brewers escaped with a 3-2 victory over the Tampa Bay Rays in Game 1 of the World Series on Friday night. DeLuca’s strikeout came after Tampa Bay’s Liam Hicks had grounded into an apparent game-ending double play that was overturned after a video review. Replays determined that Brewers shortstop Cooper Pratt’s right foot was slightly off the bag when he reached to catch a high throw from second baseman Brice Turang. Jacob Misiorowski allowed one run and four hits over five innings to earn the victory.
True baseball fans have no problem appreciating all of this. “Miz” has blazed his way into zeitgeist by throwing more than 1000 100-plus mile-per-hour pitches this year–that’s not merely an all-time record for any one person in a season, but it was more than 450 more than any other team collectively threw this year. This wasn’t one of his best efforts–he actually was out-Kd 5-3 by Rays starter Nick Martinez, himself a controversial choice because he drew the nod over both their respective post-season stars Drew Rasmussen and Freddy Peralta. Peralta, the unlikely MVP of the American League Championship Series who spent the first four months of the season as a much-booed bust by New York Mets fans, was, of course, the Brewers’ ace for their past two unsuccessful post-season runs. 
This is also the first time since 1980 where two teams who have never previously won a World’s Championship are contending (and only the third time in those aformentioned 124 years). THE ATHLETIC’s wonderful Jayson Stark, who vividly remembers 1980 because his long-time employers, the Philadelphia Phillies, were victorious that October, threw out a few other oddities and WTFs that should at least inspire some reaction:
(O)n a Friday night when they won Game 1 of the World Series for the first time in 16,082 days, the Brewers once again chased 27 outs in a way that no aspiring World Series winner before them ever has. Their 3-2 win over the Tampa Bay Rays was their ninth game this postseason. You know what those nine games have in common? No starting pitcher on the Brewers’ roster has gotten an out beyond the fifth inning in any of them. Could any previous World Series champion have made it through a whole postseason without any starter getting an out in the sixth inning and beyond? Here’s the correct answer, corroborated by our friends at Stats Perform: Of course not. In the 56 postseasons in the division-play era — the portion of baseball time in which teams needed to navigate multiple rounds to win a title — no previous World Series winner has gotten through the playoffs without at least four games in which its starter recorded an out beyond the fifth inning.
How’d the top of the fifth inning end Friday? With Brewers catcher William Contreras throwing out the Rays’ Victor Mesa Jr., trying to steal third. And how’d the top of the sixth inning end? With Contreras nailing Jonathan Aranda trying to steal second. Well, you don’t see that much. In fact, to find the last time a catcher threw out would-be base-stealers to end back-to-back World Series innings, it was a guy named Johnny Bench, who wiped out Paul Blair and Davey Johnson, to end the third and fourth innings of Game 3 of the 1970 Series between Cincinnati and Baltimore.
Oh, and Contreras drove in one of the Brewers’ three runs to boot. 
But the strong likelihood is that unless you are a true fan of the sport, or happen to be in the relative minority of these teams’ fan bases, you more than likely are paid little attention to this World Series than past ones, especially the last two. No one knows this reality better than the fine folks at FOX Sports, who are privately conceding that a matchup of the sport’s smallest market (Milwaukee) and a team who last year was playing their home games in the New York Yankees’ spring training facility (Tampa–who actually wound up playing in the city they represent for the first time as their St. Petersburg-based Tropicana Dome was undergoing major post-hurricane repair) is as nightmarish as any they might have forecast. All one needs to do is look at how few people watched the last time the Dodgers weren’t playing against either the sport’s largest market or an entire country:
- 2023: Texas vs. Arizona: 4.7 / 9.12M — historic low
- 2024: Los Angeles Dodgers vs. New York Yankees: 7.3 / 15.81M — major rebound
- 2025: Los Angeles Dodgers vs. Toronto: 7.4 / 15.86M — sustained high level
And the reality is both of these season’s participants are victims of geographic and/or historic proximity to much larger fan bases that fill their stadia to greater extents than normal when they visit. Etched in my mind are the thousands of crestfallen Cubs fans who sat silently after they schlepped up I-94 last October hoping to see their beloveds complete a comeback from 0-2 in the division series which the Brew Crew denied them. The same was true during this year’s division series where about half the modest 25,000 seat capacity of the refurbished Trop was clearly represented in Yankee garb while the team that chases the Rays out of town every February was silenced en route to an inglorious sweep and their 17th consecutive year without a world’s championship.
The even more daunting reality is that the likelihood of a lockout by an ownership consortium hell bent on instituting a salary cap, which reached its zenith while the Dodgers spent their way into back-to-back titles, that will shut down all activity by December 2nd is greater than ever. All the more consternating in light of the fact that this year’s results prove it is much more incompetence and impetuousness that has created the gap between the haves and have nots far more than market size or even payroll. I point you in the direction of my colleague’s emotional lament on our sister site at the end of the regular season last month for a recap of exactly how nuclear a winter–and very likely a spring and perhaps even a summer– may lie ahead.
By the way–for those of you who knee-jerkedly look at TV ratings as the barometer of the sport’s health and somehow feel more empathy for those at FOX Sports than I do–and many have been my actual friends–two more realities: Just like 2023, the participating markets are ones where FOX owns local stations, so they will reap additional and not insignificant benefits from outsized audiences for not just games but also adjacent newscasts–especially at a time of year when political candidates are grabbing every shred of high-end real estate at top-of-card prices that they can. And even if nationally this series comes close tpor even falls short of 2023’s levels a 4.7 for anything other than football is many multiples above what anything else in their portfolio delivers.
Yeah, it’s definitely not the sort of setting that idyllic memories of past World Series have provoked. Both teams play in antiseptic domes and exclusively at night. Starting on a Friday night so as to avoid the NFL completely is a necessary but unfortunate concession to exactly where the sport sits in the hierarchy of priorities. And outside of “Les Miz” I defy anyone to pick out any of the other participants from a police line-up. Stark pointed out exactly how inexperienced and unknown these teams are:
Ready for the complete list of position players in this series who had ever participated in a World Series before this one? It won’t take long. Here goes:
Yandy Díaz
End of roll call
And Díaz, of course, isn’t exactly Derek Jeter. But he did play five games for the Rays in the 2020 World Series.
That was the one, of course, that was played exclusively on the neutral diamond in the even more antiseptic Globe Life Field after a compromised 60-game COVID-impacted season. The next lowest-rated WS ever behind 2023. So when Diaz steps to the plate Monday night in St. Petersburg it will be first time he will be hearing hometown fans rooting for him–and you probably wouldn’t know he was without his nameplate.
But it’s baseball. Meaningful games being played by the sport’s two best teams attempting to make history. And as someone who endured the summer of 1994 that saw the season come to an inconclusive end on my freaking birthday while a team that had at that point not yet won a world’s championship–the Montreal Expos–were cruising to their first-ever full-season post-season. That team ultimately didn’t survive. I honestly have to wonder if any others might fall by the wayside if 2027 evolves the way my colleague fears it could.
So I’ll personally pitch for you to at least try to care about this World Series. Even if you’ll do nothing else but scream at the omnipresent greed on both sides or wonder aloud how Yandy Diaz is the face of the American League’s best team. Because who knows how long it will be before you can complain in real time ever again.
Until next time…