Still, this year’s World Series winner will be the first bottom-half spender since the 2015 Kansas City Royals — a rebuke of sorts to what MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred had to say about the sport this year.
“For this game to reach its full potential, we must continue to address the concerns of our fans, particularly the concerns that are central to our mission, which is competitive balance,” Manfred said in July. “We need to ensure that fans in the markets at the start of the season have a realistic belief that their team has a chance of winning.”
Manfred made the comments as part of an ongoing campaign to implement a salary cap, which MLB is aggressively pursuing because it claims payroll is correlated with performance. (A somewhat contested claim.)
But the players’ union, unsurprisingly, views the World Series game as another example of how well the sport works.
“This is further evidence that the league’s supposed rationale for a salary cap through ‘competitive balance’ does not hold water,” Meyer told NBC News in a statement. “But that’s never been the real reason they want a salary cap. They want it to increase their profits and the value of their franchise.”
Will people watch?
Given the vagueness surrounding this game in the small market, there will inevitably be online debate about World Series television ratings. Will fan interest wane because they aren’t big-name teams? The combined viewership of this year’s ALCS and NLCS was up slightly from last year, according to Nielsen.
The last two World Series, both of which featured the Dodgers, as well as the Yankees and Toronto Blue Jays, averaged more than 15 million viewers, the most since 2017. Tampa’s first-place finish in the World Series in 2008 averaged 13 million viewers and was the lowest-rated series in history at the time. His 2020 appearance was during Covid and the Dodgers-Rays series drew an average audience of 9.8 million, which remains the second-smallest average of all time, according to Nielsen figures.
Market size appears to have an effect on Milwaukee and Tampa Bay during the playoffs. The Rays drew 3.7 million viewers against the Cleveland Guardians after drawing 4 million against the Yankees, according to Nielsen. The Brewers and San Diego Padres drew just 2.6 million viewers in the Division Series, while Milwaukee vs. Los Angeles was seen by 7.9 million people each night.
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