The ALCS gets underway this evening at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, and it’s a rather surreal moment for not just the fans of the Rays and Guardians (who are both starving for a championship), but for the Red Sox, the AL East, and the sport as a whole.
With the owners getting ready to make their most aggressive push for a salary cap in a generation — Something John Henry has wanted for a long time now — it’s kind of astounding that the last, dying breath of baseball under this current CBA is being played in some of the smallest markets the sport has to offer. We already went over the weight the NLCS between the Brewers and Dodgers might carry in the upcoming labor war over the weekend, but on the AL side of things, the small market takeover is already complete, and we should take a moment to reflect on it.
The Rays aren’t just in the ALCS, they’re in the AL East. They beat both the Red Sox and Yankees over 162 games, and then they went out and swept the Yankees in lobsided fashion, right after the Yankees swept the Red Sox in lobsided fashion. This was a total beatdown! The Rays were clearly and repeatedly the best team in the division in 2026, and even though they’ve been good and competitive for many years, it feels like we’re reaching some kind of tipping point with both the Red Sox and Yankees proving to be nothing more than Wild Card fodder for two years in a row.
The Red Sox specifically have been accused of trying to be too much like the Rays for many years now, and it increasingly seems like we’re getting the worst of both worlds. On one hand, if it’s true, the Red Sox were right about “this” being the way to run your team in 2026, but they’re also not anywhere near as good as the Rays in getting all of their assets to work together as a cohesive unit. Instead, the Sox appear to be caught in-between, where they spend much more on payroll than teams like the Rays and Guardians, but not enough to dominate the landscape and fill their biggest needs (where is our a stud power bat?). And then, the front office also can’t get the pieces they do invest in to be as situationally productive as the Tampa manages to do over and over again.
It’s a very, very awkward situation.
So, where does this leave us going forward? The Red Sox have spent the last handful years acting very much like a team that believes a salary cap is going to be imposed in a specific window very soon while also failing to get above third place in the division during that time (five straight years and counting). If you want to be optimistic, you might argue this will leave them more prepared than other big market teams if or when a salary cap is imposed. But here’s the problem: They also seem to be less prepared than the small market teams who are nailing it right now. So the situation kind of sucks no matter what, and Rays and Guardians being in the ALCS underscores this in a bizarre, humbling and underwhelming way.
The Red Sox should be flexing their financial muscle. They’re not! Then, in a world where the Red Sox are not flexing their full financial muscle, they should also be further along in getting things right after trying to adopt the cost effective strategies used by teams like the Rays, Guardians and Brewers for the better part of a decade. Again, they’re not! About the only thing they seem prepared to do is enter a post lockout world with a salary cap imposed somewhere around their current payroll. However, if we get an all small market World Series, who knows if they’re even going to get that prediction correct?
The more I look at the landscape, the harder it is to find an October outcome that’s going to make me less angry in the coming months. The Red Sox won four championships in 15 years powered by a financial engine that got its fuel from a dedicated and passionate fanbase willing to pay high prices for Fenway tickets and NESN subscriptions if it means getting a solid product in return. Not only have the Red Sox not held up their end of the bargain throughout the 2020s, but they intentionally thrown it away while now getting beat by teams with less resources who they’re supposedly trying to emulate. I find this so disgusting, and I have little to no confidence there’s anywhere near enough motivation on Jersey Street to find a proper solution.
Use this thread to talk about both LCS games tonight, what it might mean for the Red Sox going forward, and as always, be good to one another.
