The 2026 World Series matchup between the Milwaukee Brewers and Tampa Bay Rays is rich with subplots. Neither team has won a World Series, so we're in for a first when it comes time to hoist the trophy. That hasn't happened since the Philadelphia Phillies and Kansas City Royals met in the 1980 World Series.
There's also the backdrop of the ongoing negotiations on a new collective bargaining agreement. MLB, its constituent team owners, and commissioner Rob Manfred -- who takes his marching orders from those owners -- are pushing for a cap on payrolls. Indeed, everything the management side has proposed in those negotiations has been tied to the players' acceptance of a cap, and everything has been rejected by the players' union as long as it is tied to said cap.
From a rhetorical standpoint, this World Series matchup is quite inconvenient for Manfred and the owners. These are two of the smallest markets in MLB with two bottom-tier payrolls. The Rays especially don't invest much in the on-field product. Consider:
| Team | 40-man roster payroll rank | Nielsen market size rank | Forbes franchise valuation rank |
|---|---|---|---|
Brewers | 19th | 30th | 21st |
Rays | 28th | 14th | 24th |
Add those payroll rankings together, and it's the lowest on record for any World Series. It's the smallest combined market size for a World Series since the St. Louis Cardinals and Kansas City Royals met in 1985. These realities are even more striking once you consider that, in 2026, the Brewers swept the dynastic Los Angeles Dodgers in the NLCS, while the Rays vanquished the historically preeminent New York Yankees in the AL East race and then again in the ALDS.
How do you argue that super-spenders like the Dodgers and Yankees, or even disappointments like the Mets and Blue Jays, are breaking baseball when this is your World Series? MLB will, of course, argue it anyway, but the narrative packs less of a punch this October.
To be sure, there's a definite element of ownership neglect with those payroll figures. Both teams are revenue-sharing recipients on balance, and such clubs that run low payrolls make enough via revenue sharing to cover most or, in some cases, all of their cash payroll. Circumstance plays an obvious role, yes, but so does the will to compete and win on the part of owners.
Still, the question remains: How have the Brewers and Rays built championship-grade rosters without spending much at all?
In terms of a tactical approach, both have seen high contact rates on offense as a neglected trait across the league, and they've selected for that. Like most other clubs, they prioritize velocity and repertoire depth on the pitching front. For these purposes, though, we're talking about the paths to roster construction, and, unsurprisingly, the Brewers and Rays have a lot in common in their preferred means of player acquisition (and not just because Brewers president of baseball operations Matt Arnold spent nine years in the Rays front office under Andrew Friedman).
The temptation is to think that both of these small-budget teams are heavily homegrown. That's the best way to get cheap production across the roster, especially when many of those homegrown talents are in their salary-controlled years. As we'll see, though, that's not really the case. These two teams are among the very best at identifying and developing talent acquired via the draft and through amateur international signings. As noted, these two clubs don't invest as much as they should in player payroll, but they do have large and wide-ranging baseball operations and scouting staffs within their front offices. The Brewers and Rays know their own players, of course, but if there's a superpower, it's how well they appraise players, especially young ones, in other organizations. That skill informs much of their current success.
To begin digging into the matter of how the low-payroll, wee-market Rays and Brewers built their rosters, we'll look at how they compare to the other 10 teams that made the postseason in 2026 when it comes to the three most common paths to player acquisition: free agents, homegrown talents, and trade acquisitions. We'll not worry about waiver claims and Rule 5 draftees, as those typically provide less or even negligible value.
Homegrown talent
First, let's look at each playoff team's number of homegrown players -- i.e., those initially signed as amateurs by the club in question and who have never played for another club -- on the current 40-man roster (note that most teams do not presently have all 40 spots filled, so these roster totals will vary from club to club):
| Team | Homegrown players on 40-man roster |
|---|---|
23 | |
16 | |
Dodgers | 15 |
14 | |
13 | |
Brewers, White Sox | 12 |
Phillies, Red Sox, Yankees | 11 |
Rays | 8 |
6 |
The Brewers and Rays, as you can see, both rank in the bottom half among 2026 playoff teams when it comes to homegrown players on the 40. In the Rays' case, the most notable fully in-house talents are Jonathan Aranda, Chandler Simpson, Taylor Walls, and Ian Seymour. Additionally, lefty starter and ace-when-healthy Shane McClanahan, who's been out since early September with forearm soreness and presumably won't be able to pitch in the World Series, came up through the organization.
As for the Brewers, they're not the most homegrown of playoff teams, but one can argue no one's collection of internal talents has moved the needle quite so much. Consider that the Brewers' position players and pitchers during the regular season combined for a WAR of 50.4. Making up slightly more than half of that tally were five homegrown players: Jacob Misiorowski, Jackson Chourio, Brice Turang, Garrett Mitchell, and Logan Henderson. This is to say nothing of Cooper Pratt and Aaron Ashby, whom the Brewers also drafted and developed.
Free agents
Next up is free agents, and these two World Series combatants aren't high on that list either:
| Team | Free agent signings on 40-man roster |
|---|---|
Dodgers | 12 |
Padres | 11 |
Red Sox | 10 |
Braves | 9 |
Phillies | 8 |
Yankees | 7 |
Astros, Rays | 6 |
Cubs | 5 |
White Sox | 4 |
Brewers | 3 |
Guardians | 1 |
The Rays' highest-salaried free agent addition is 36-year-old starter Nick Martinez, who inked a one-year, $13 million pact for this season. His deal also includes a largely meaningless mutual option for 2027. Martinez, who put up a 3.9 WAR during the regular season and figures to make at least one World Series start against the Brewers, has more than justified the investment from the team's standpoint. Lefty Steven Matz is on a two-year, $15 million contract, which makes him the Rays' largest investment on the market. Needless to say, the Rays aren't built through free agency.
The same goes for Milwaukee. The Brewers' largest market investment is Brandon Woodruff, who accepted the qualifying offer this past offseason and is being paid $22 million this season. Only team captain and organizational stalwart Christian Yelich is being paid a higher salary by the Brewers this year ($26 million as part of a nine-year, $215 million extension signed in 2020). Woodruff, though, isn't what we think of when it comes to typical free agent additions. He's an organizational lifer who's been with the Brewers since signing with them in 2014.
Woodruff is one of the best starting pitchers in baseball when he's healthy, but injuries have been the throughline of his career. Maybe, though, he'll be a surprise contributor in the World Series, as he's been assiduously working his way back from dogged shoulder issues. In terms of more traditional free agents signed away from other clubs, catcher and bench thunder-wielder Gary Sánchez is the Brewers' biggest current investment. He's on a one-year, $1.75 million contract.
Trade acquisitions
Finally, we arrive at trade acquisitions. The majority of each team's 40-man roster is populated at a majority level by trade pick-ups:
| Team | Trade acquisitions on 40-man roster |
|---|---|
Rays | 24 |
Brewers | 22 |
White Sox | 20 |
Red Sox | 19 |
Phillies | 15 |
Astros, Padres, Yankees | 12 |
Cubs, Dodgers, Guardians | 10 |
Braves | 8 |
The Rays have the most trade pick-ups on the 40-man, not just among playoff teams but also among all 30 MLB teams. The Marlins are next at 23, and then come the Brewers. Such frequency speaks to the Rays' and Brewers' established knack for knowing which players to target in trade and, broadly speaking, which players to give up. The "never trade with the Rays" contemporary chestnut of recent baseball wisdom is overstated -- they can and do lose trades -- but there's no question that trades have done the heavy lifting in the present roster's high level of success.
The Rays made their boldest stroke in acquiring 22-year-old burgeoning superstar Junior Caminero via trade with the Guardians in November 2021, when he was just an 18-year-old in the Dominican Summer League. Today, even just two full seasons into Caminero's MLB career, it looks like a franchise-altering trade for the Rays. That's not all, though. Yandy Díaz was also acquired in a trade with Cleveland, this one roughly three years before the Caminero swap. Closer Bryan Baker came to the Rays in a 2025 deadline trade with the division-rival Orioles. Speaking of the deadline, lead executive Erick Neander earlier this season raised the Rays' ceiling quite substantially by going out and getting ALCS MVP Freddy Peralta from the Mets, catcher Liam Hicks from the Marlins, and key setup man Tyler Wells from, again, the Orioles.
The Rays accumulated a WAR of 41.2 this season, and their trade additions make up 23.9 WAR of that total. It's a team, both in raw numbers and overall contributions, built mostly through perhaps the most direct test of an organization's faculties -- some of mine for some of yours.
There's some connective tissue here, too. Peralta, of course, was a long-time Brewer before he was traded to the Mets ahead of his walk year (a year in which he was making $8 million), and he'll be taking the mound against his former team in the World Series, likely for multiple starts. The big one, though, is right-hander Drew Rasmussen, who was the Rays' ace for the bulk of the regular season. The Rays acquired him from the Brewers back in May 2021 as part of a four-player deal that sent shortstop Willy Adames to Milwaukee. Adames was one of the Brewers' best players for his three-plus seasons there before signing with the Giants as a free agent. As for Rasmussen, he's been one of MLB's top starting pitchers over the last two years, and his overall body of work with the Rays is exceptional. Coincidentally, the Rays drafted Rasmussen with the 31st overall pick out of Oregon State in 2017. However, they failed to sign him, and then the Brewers secured his services the next year by drafting him in the sixth round.
As for the Brewers and top decision-maker Matt Arnold, trades have also left a deep footprint on their current roster. The most famous trade in recent Brewers history was one made by Arnold's predecessor, David Stearns (coincidentally, he now leads the Mets, who traded for Peralta in the 2025-26 offseason). That was the 2018 blockbuster that brought Yelich to Milwaukee. Yelich is post-peak, but the newly named captain is still a vital presence for Milwaukee. Elsewhere -- and more germane to the current Brewers model -- trades for William Contreras, Jake Bauers, Andrew Vaughn, Trevor Megill, Robert Gasser, and Chad Patrick played a vital role in the team's success this season. Arnold, like the Rays' Neander, was also active at the deadline, as he fortified the pitching staff with Dustin May, JoJo Romero, and Antonio Senzatela.
Trade additions claimed both LCS MVP awards (Peralta for the Rays, Bauers for the Brewers), and it likewise wouldn't be shocking if a player acquired by the Rays or Brewers via trade winds up earning top individual honors in the World Series. That's a predictable consequence when the two World Series clubs have combined for, oh, almost 50 trade acquisitions.
In broad terms, the Rays and Brewers have built their championship rosters in the ways that low-spenders must. Milwaukee has made quite a lot of trades, but extracted most of its value in 2026 from homegrown players. The Rays have made even more trades, and most of their 2026 contributions have indeed come from outsiders.
When it comes to World Series teams of a recent vintage, this is something of a departure -- one worth appreciating and, no doubt, emulating if you're a team that aspires to reach the heights that the Brewers and Rays presently occupy.
