"A World Series as great as the one that ended over the weekend throws off enough light to reveal the relative shabbiness and artifice of its staging; the things that it was supposed to Be About naturally look small and dull relative to what it actually was. Before the National League Championship Series, the matchup between the Dodgers and Brewers was framed as a battle for baseball's future."
"The Dodgers are rich and spend a lot of money, and so stood for a future that was comparatively cold and small for how readily it could be bought; the Brewers won 97 games in simultaneously confounding and convincing fashion with a roster of players available on the waiver wires of most 10-team fantasy leagues, and so were the avatar for the belief that anything really could happen,"
A frenzied, late World Series immediately ceded to the offseason as most eligible MLB players declared free agency days after the title concluded. Celebrations in Los Angeles featured a boozy, exhausted presentation with Blake Snell's "6-7" moment, signaling a rapid seasonal shift. The Dodgers and Brewers matchup crystallized competing models for baseball's future: the Dodgers represented wealth and the ability to buy talent, described as comparatively cold and constrained, while the Brewers showcased a 97-win season built from waiver-wire pickups and inexpensive contributors. The tension pits purchasable inevitability against unpredictable possibility, a divide with political resonance that resists tidy mapping to actual politics.
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