Brewers and Rays Open World Series Friday as MLB Eyes Weaker Ratings and a Looming Lockout

Since the Rays closed out Cleveland 7-3 in Game 6 of the ALCS on Monday, Oct. 19, the matchup has been set: the Milwaukee Brewers against the Tampa Bay Rays in a World Series that opens Friday night, Oct. 23, in Milwaukee. It pairs the best record in the National League with the best in the American League. Neither franchise has ever won a title.

The Brewers got there by sweeping the Los Angeles Dodgers in the NLCS. Tampa Bay got there on the bats of Junior Caminero and Yandy Díaz, who each hit a two-run homer in the clincher, and five and a third innings from Freddy Peralta.

The ratings question

This is the kind of World Series owners say they want: small-market teams breaking through instead of the Dodgers and the Yankees. It also carries a TV risk.

LA Times columnist Bill Shaikin notes that the 2024 Dodgers-Yankees series drew almost double the audience of the 2023 Diamondbacks-Rangers matchup. He expects this year's numbers to look much closer to 2023 than 2024.

Fox airs the World Series under a seven-year, $5.1 billion deal that expires in 2028.

Consultant Ed Desser, who launched NBA TV and helped negotiate the Dodgers' record SportsNet LA deal, argues that big-market teams bring more than big audiences. "It's commonplace for people to hate the Dodgers, hate the Yankees — and, to some extent, that's good for business, because it's another rooting interest," he said. "I'm not sure that anybody has an ax to grind against the Rays or the Brewers."

Neither Desser nor Bob Thompson, the former president of Fox Sports Networks, believes the league is headed for a steep revenue drop from the Fall Classic. Desser said expected audience matters, but Shaikin's column describes it as less decisive than people assume.

The lockout backdrop

The series also lands just before a labor fight. Yahoo Sports writer Oliver Fox wrote that the start of the 2027 season will "almost certainly" be locked out, and that the 2026 World Series will be the last thing fans remember going in.

The dispute centers on a salary cap. Owners argue a cap would improve competitive balance, strengthen the product and raise franchise values and revenue. Fox points to the Dodgers, who have won the last two titles, as a driver of that argument. A third straight would have strengthened it.

The MLB Players Association has opposed a cap throughout its history. Fox writes that players see a cap as the end of the leverage that produced deals like Juan Soto's 15-year, $765 million contract, and as a ceiling on what the next generation can earn. Fox concedes the owners' claim that a cap would lift TV revenue and valuations is accurate. The fight, he writes, is over who controls how that money flows.

MLB has already launched a public campaign in favor of a cap, according to Fox, who expects the dispute to be fought largely in public opinion.

Manfred's media plan for 2028

Commissioner Rob Manfred told Sports Business Journal that MLB Network's production operation will play a "major role" in the league's media package after 2028. He said the capacity "served us really well in the disruption on the local media side."

That disruption began when Diamond Sports Group, the former owner of the Bally Sports networks, went bankrupt. MLB took over the Padres' local broadcasts in 2023 and built MLB Local Media to run them. Manfred now says he expects MLB to hold local rights for all 30 teams by 2028, and that the league will not sell them as a standalone package.

MLB Network's production work touched much of this season's TV output. It co-produced Apple TV's Friday Night Baseball doubleheaders, contributed to Netflix's pregame and postgame shows and produced Peacock's Sunday Stretch. It will build the global feed of the World Series for broadcasters worldwide.

The league's national deals with Fox, TNT Sports, NBC, ESPN, Netflix and Apple all expire after 2028.

A combined package of local and national games is a harder sell than it sounds. Before MLB can bundle local rights nationally, it needs the Yankees, the Dodgers and other big-market clubs to agree. Their local TV contracts run well into the next decade, and none of those clubs has publicly committed.

The World Series will answer part of the ratings question within days. The answer on those big-market contracts, and on whether a cap-driven labor fight leaves any 2027 games to sell, is much further off.