Is there a secret to success the best Major League Baseball teams have already found?

With the 2026 World Series matchup set between the Tampa Bay Rays and Milwaukee Brewers, there's been debate circulating about the lessons to be learned from those two organizations' success this season.

After years of wailing and gnashing of teeth over salary caps and payrolls and free agency, Tampa and Milwaukee demonstrate that most of those concerns are overblown.

While many have made the claim that those two organizations are "outliers," that they're the exception to the big market, high-payroll rule, a quick glance at recent history shows that's not necessarily the case.

Since 2017, the last 10 years, here's how many World Series appearances Tampa has made relative to some other big market or high-payroll teams: ONE OF MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL'S OWNERS JUST DESTROYED THE LEAGUE'S ENTIRE ARGUMENT FOR A LOCKOUT Milwaukee reaching the World Series means that 19 out of 30 MLB teams have reached the championship round since 2010.

Meanwhile, 18 out of 32 NFL teams have reached the Super Bowl over that same time frame.

63% of MLB has reached the World Series, while just 56% of the NFL has gotten to the Super Bowl, despite the salary cap.

Which raises the question, how are these teams so consistently good, despite their limited player budget? Well, there's an obvious answer that takes a little digging to find out: they spend money on other, important areas or team and roster building that many others forego.

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DOWNLOAD HIS DAILY PODCAST NOW! Several baseball fans on X have noted that the Brewers, Rays, and Dodgers are among the teams with the largest analytics departments in the league.

One even found that there's a not-insignificant relationship between having a larger analytics staff and winning more games.

It's interesting, because much of the discourse on televised baseball is that analytics are "ruining" the sport.

Yet the larger these departments are, the better their teams perform.

Why would that be? SIGN UP FOR THE DAILY OUTKICK NEWSLETTER "Analytics" is an overly broad term that doesn't fully cover what these departments do, or what they're researching.

It's not just, "hey this stat looks good," it's combining details like bat path, angles of attack, pitch shape and pitch design, exit velocities, barrel rate, performance against different pitch types, do hitters struggle against certain reliever arm slots, what's the best combination of pitch sequencing to attack an opposing lineup...all of it is part of an analytics team.