The Rays beat the Guardians 7-3 to clinch the AL pennant Monday night, and for the first time since I can remember, I get to watch a World Series with absolutely nothing at stake.
The Yankees’ own trip to October ended early, so I’m watching this one as a tourist instead of a hostage, and the tourism is great. Tampa Bay is headed to the Fall Classic to face Milwaukee, and the Rays and Brewers both got here as their league’s No. 1 seed, which means nobody gets to wave this away as a wild-card fluke. They’re also two franchises that have never won a World Series. That’s the whole show this year: a shot for one of them to stop being the answer to a trivia question.
Freddy Peralta started Game 6 and went 5.1 innings with one earned run, which is a tidy little line for something that was actually a little absurd when you remember the Rays got him from the Mets right before the August 3 trade deadline. He ended up winning ALCS MVP for a team he wasn’t even pitching for three months ago. Baseball is the only sport where that sentence is even possible.
Junior Caminero and Yandy Diaz both hit two-run homers, and Richie Palacios chipped in a two-out, two-run double, which is how you put a Guardians team with no outs left to give out of its misery. Caminero’s homer trot clocked in at 38.7 seconds, the longest postseason trot of the Statcast era, a stretch that goes back to 2015. That’s not a typo. He basically took a victory lap around the bases.
Here’s where it gets weird, though.
https://x.com/RochHardSox/status/2112374512390185211
Neither team has a built-in national fan base or a $300 million payroll. The Brewers already outwon a team that outspent them just to get here, and Tampa Bay has been doing more with less for two decades while everyone waited for a relocation headline that still hasn’t landed. This is what it looks like when a sport corrects itself after a decade of the same three or four big names hogging the stage.
Somebody still has to lose, though. Tampa Bay is already 0-for-2 in prior World Series trips, falling to the Phillies in 2008 and the Dodgers in 2020, while Milwaukee’s only previous appearance ended in a seven-game loss to the Cardinals back in 1982. One of these fan bases is going to watch its team get this close and still go home empty, which is the exact outcome both franchises have specialized in for their entire existence.
That’s the part keeping this from being a clean feel-good story — someone still has to keep being the answer to the trivia question.
I don’t care who wins. I just want it to go seven games, and I want Caminero to find a way to make that trot even longer.
