Will My Ultimate Dream Come True?

Martin Luther King Jr.—now that man knew how to dream. Of course, he wouldn’t live to see his dream come true, nor will the rest of us.

But I digress.

This is about my dream, one that could come true as early as this week.

It involves cork, rubber, and yarn, all covered in cowhide and 108 stitches courtesy some factory in Costa Rica.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Pennsylvania grow batches of maple trees, the ones used to make wooden sticks that can smack the cowhide.

You may know this whole operation as baseball.

And that of the Major League variety, headquartered in New York City, is the stuff dreams are made of.

You’ve obviously heard of Field of Dreams, but try this one on for size.

Team A plays in the league’s smallest market by population, a diminutive metro of just 1.5 million. For perspective, that’s around the same as Providence, Rhode Island, and Louisville, Freaking Kentucky.

The squad has never won a World Series, toiling away in relative anonymity for the greater part of six decades.

Its stadium is somewhere near the Great Lakes, a euphemism, as you know, for the Rust Belt.

The place gets cold, and let’s be honest—no one grows up saying they want to live there. In fact, the city that anchors the metro is down 178,917 residents over the past 65 years.

Relative to size, the team pays its players generously, though its payroll is still only the 19th-highest in the league, greater than that of only 11 other teams.

Team B plays in the league’s second smallest market by population, home to around 2.1 million. Compared to that, even Portland, Oregon, feels like the big city.

The outfit hasn’t won the World Series since Harry S. Truman was president. If you’re a numbers person, that was in 1948.

Its stadium, too, is somewhere near the Great Lakes, and yeah, the place is Rusty as hell.

It’s a magnet for lake-effect snow if not necessarily people. In fact, the backbone of the metro has lost 551,200 dwellers over the past 75 years.

The team pays its players almost in accordance to market size, sporting the lowest payroll in the entire league.

It’s a dream come true, that of the possibility that Team A and Team B meet in the 2026 World Series.

The coastal elites will tune out, not wanting to confront a metaphor that shines a light on their overpriced and overrated existence.

The owners will fume, knowing their argument that a salary cap is needed to help small markets will ring hollow, trying their best to downplay the cap’s effect on profits and thereby franchise valuation.

In the grand scheme of things, absolutely nothing will change—big egos and big money always win.

But for one glorious week in October, the little guys on the little lakes will be able to play pretend.

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Team A = Milwaukee Brewers

Team B = Cleveland Guardians