For the first time in a long time, the World Series will not need to feature a dynasty, a defending champion or a franchise accustomed to lifting the trophy. Tampa Bay Rays and Milwaukee Brewers went to the end with something much more interesting in common: neither knows what it means to be a Major League champion.
And they are not here by accident.
Milwaukee and Tampa Bay had the two best records in all of baseball during the regular season. From April to September, they were the teams that most consistently did the most basic and at the same time most difficult thing in this sport: winning.
Now they will have the opportunity to decide among themselves who will do it for the first time in October.
You have to go back to 1980 to find a World Series between two franchises that had never before been champions. That time the Philadelphia Phillies and Kansas City Royals faced each other. The Phillies won in six games and opened their showcase after almost a century of existence.
Forty-six years later, baseball once again finds itself facing a similar scenario.
Milwaukee has waited since 1982 to return to a World Series. That was his only appearance and it ended with a loss to St. Louis. Tampa Bay knows this scenario a little better, although neither does its outcome. They lost to Philadelphia in 2008 and to the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2020.
This time one will necessarily have to win. And perhaps that is the best story that could give us this season.
In an MLB in which much of the conversation every winter revolves around contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars, Tampa Bay and Milwaukee represent another way to compete. They don’t have the most powerful checkbooks, but they have shown that building a roster well, developing talent and finding value where others don’t see it yet can take you to the last game of the schedule.
So it would be unfair to simply call them an October surprise. Surprises appear for a few weeks. These two teams won for six months.
The World Series just ended up confirming it.
When the last out falls there will be celebration, champagne and a trophy being raised for the first time somewhere. In Tampa or Milwaukee there will be a generation of fans who will finally be able to say something they have never been able to say before: “WE ARE CHAMPIONS.”
