How will a small-market World Series affect baseball’s future?

With the Milwaukee Brewers and Tampa Bay Rays currently battling in the World Series, Major League Baseball has something it rarely gets: a small-market Fall Classic. But with a potential lockout on the horizon in December, this year’s World Series could affect the future of the game beyond the baseball diamond.

What did the commentators say?

This World Series is “equally intriguing for what it means on the field” as “for what it means off the field, as terms such as ‘market size,’ ‘payroll’ and ‘revenue sharing’ have become as big a part of baseball as hits, home runs and RBIs,” said NBC News. The small-spending Brewers and Rays beat out several big spenders to make it to the Fall Classic: Milwaukee “swept the Los Angeles Dodgers and their $412 million team in the NLCS,” while Tampa took down the New York Yankees’ $310 million-payroll club.

Whoever emerges victorious will be the first team to win the World Series in the bottom half of the league’s spending since the Kansas City Royals in 2015, a “rebuke of sorts to what MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred had to say about the sport,” said NBC. Manfred “has set this winter up to be a big huffy showdown over runaway major market payrolls and the desperate need to install a salary cap,” said The Wall Street Journal. But the opposite happened, as a “couple of crafty, thrifty, well-run teams with low payrolls but dynamo management knocked out the spenders to reach the big show.”

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For team owners, it “plays right into the hands of their opponent in the labor dispute,” said the Journal. The MLB Players Association has long argued that a “cap isn’t necessary, because money isn’t what delivers championships.” But the “truth is it’s a bit of both — a baseball team needs smart management and talent development, but having loads of money can make up for mistakes.”

What next?

Many of the players also feel the small-market World Series is a positive trend. “It kind of paints a different picture, right? You don’t really need all the money out there to win baseball games,” Brewers closer Trevor Megill said to USA Today. “It kind of just matters who’s in the clubhouse and what they’re willing to do for each other.’’