Ongoing Attempts, Volume 7: From Junior Caminero to Will Ospreay

The Tampa Bay Rays are headed to the World Series to face the Milwaukee Brewers.

Over the years, the Rays have been a competent baseball team that was largely anonymous. They have a lot of very good players, some great players, but few characters that have broken through into larger, mainstream recognition.

That's probably the perception of this year's Rays team as well. My guess is that most people cannot name more than a couple players on the Rays. That's also probably how people view the Brewers. And those notions might lead to some eye-rolling and unenthusiastic opinions about the 2026 World Series.

I think those people are wrong. I think there's more to each of these teams, for one thing, and that this World Series isn't just for hardcore baseball fans. We'll get to that in a second.

I also think that people are going to appreciate the chance to see some star power they didn't know was there. Take Junior Caminero. He is the third baseman for the Rays, and this dude is an absolute star.

This is Ongoing Attempts, my weekly newsletter about sports and connections. Subscribing is always free.

An incredible moment in Tampa Bay

It was just two years ago that the Rays lost their home stadium to a hurricane. They played in a minor league park last season while Tropicana Field was repaired. It's not exactly a legendary venue, but it is still significant for a franchise to be away for over a year and then regain their home field.

I'll be honest, I was not thinking about this dynamic and its significance to the Rays' run to the World Series until this celebration from the aforementioned Caminero. He hit a two-run home run in the bottom of the 7th inning of the deciding game of the American League Championship Series, and he let it all out with his reaction.

The celebration says it all and feels like the culmination of a long and challenging journey. It also carries weight because of Caminero's star power and his significance as Tampa Bay's franchise player.

If that clip doesn't convince you, here's a quick look at Caminero's numbers this season. He batted .276, which feels like batting .350 in 2026 terms. He hit 42 home runs and had 100 RBI. That was good for a .885 OPS (on-base plus slugging) and a 144 OPS+, where 100 is the league average.

This dude is a star. The Brewers have stars, too. These were two of the best teams in baseball this year, after all, even if they are more beloved by a certain type of fan.

World Series for the sickos

Baseball nerds, present company included, know lots of players on each side and hold these teams in high regard. We appreciate the savvy and the well-rounded rosters and the coaching decisions that led the Rays and Brewers to the AL and NL pennants, respectively.

We are excited about this World Series, us nerds. Or as I saw Tyler Maun put it when I poked my head in to see what was happening on BlueSky:

So yes, we have to acknowledge that this is the alternative to another World Series that has Shohei Ohtani and the Dodgers and/or Aaron Judge and the Yankees. These teams play in small markets and will not draw as much national attention.

That means there will be discussion and arguments about ratings and baseball's lack of popularity. But I am here to tell you that, while this is a World Series for the sickos, it can also be exactly the kind of story that casual baseball fans love.

These are two teams without the massive resources and payroll, putting it together by building rosters with lesser-known players who earned their spot, offering complementary skills and doing the little things. They play good defense and pitch well. They took down the big bad guys to get here, and one of them will win their first World Series ever.

I think you put that all together, and you've got a pretty darn compelling World Series.

It shouldn’t just be for the sickos. But it probably is.

More about the sickos and the stars

This is the second time in the past couple years that I have been called or considered myself a “sicko” for one of my hobbies.

Tony Khan is the president of All Elite Wrestling (AEW), which is the wrestling promotion I watch almost exclusively at this point. He is also in charge of "booking" the shows, meaning he sets the matches and segments.

There are so many great wrestlers who have gotten their chances to shine, particularly with in-ring performances, because of AEW programming. Tony Khan loves to put together matches that let these wrestlers showcase what they can do. Oftentimes, that means shows that contain a lot of lesser known performers and random match-ups.

This dynamic with Tony Khan's booking is a frequent topic, and it was especially prevalent a couple years ago. In response to some criticism, Khan offered this rebuttal:

“I book wrestling for the sickos because that's what I am and that's who I care about.”

In many of these cases, this notion of what the "sickos" like was about a lack of star power, or a perceived lack of star power. In others, the shows absolutely contained big stars, but the lack of logical stories meant that the stars weren't really functioning as main characters. Therefore, the perception was that the wrestling was only for the hardcore fans.

That dynamic feels like it parallels the challenge for Major League Baseball. I made my case here for Caminero as a star. Jacob Misiorowski throws 105 MPH fastballs for the Brewers; it is a singular and thrilling experience to watch him pitch. He is a star.

Exciting as these guys might be, however, they haven't broken contain to stardom outside of baseball. They haven't even fully broken through within baseball because they are in smaller markets. This lack of star power was something Joe Posnanski wrote about this week:

But all in all, casual fans tuning in to this year’s World Series will need to learn about these players in a way that feels different from years past. Who is Jake Bauers? Tell me about Chandler Simpson? How good is Brice Turang?

He continued on to make the case that baseball isn't geared towards stars these days. For example, pitchers are deployed in smart ways, but that means shorter outings and limited doses where they don't always have the time to become the big story in a game.

The position players are darned good, but they might be specialists and not all-around stars. They also might, as Joe notes, strike out a ton. That works in terms of success for modern baseball teams, especially deep teams like the Brewers and Rays. But it doesn't always work for building stars.

What has to change for baseball to have stars again? I'm not sure there's an obvious answer. It's not fair to ask them to be Shohei Ohtani, and even he needed the Dodgers to gain larger recognition. With so many disparate ways to get attention these days, be it on the field or off, I'm not sure any of us can peg what it would look like for baseball to have big stars right now.

It would be some combination of on-field excellence, significance to the sport, and that feeling that makes some guys different. That last piece is the hardest to pin down but also the most important: the presence they command, their ability to be that gravitational force when they are part of any given moment.

The fun thing about baseball, not unlike pro wrestling, is that a star can take a lot of forms. That next star doesn't have to be any one archetype, as long as he somehow arrives at that rare combination of things. It might be a big hulking slugger, but it might also be a scrawny pitcher with glasses or slight-in-stature position player.

Back over on the wrestling side of this discussion, AEW also had a lot of really good performers but no obvious candidates for who could break through as the big star. Then Will Ospreay arrived, and he brought a combination of charisma and once-in-a-lifetime athleticism that makes him a different kind of star.

Ospreay is still on the rise, but it has been coming into place from AEW with him in the lead, both in terms of momentum and recognition for the other excellent wrestlers on the roster. I'm curious to see if something similar could happen for Major League Baseball.

This newsletter is not sponsored by DraftKings

Ongoing Attempts is far-reaching and covers a lot of topics, many of them random. I'm fortunate enough to be in a position to observe and then share what I notice without any assigned topics.

With things being open-ended that way, I cannot promise a lot in terms of topics. But I will promise this: it will never be about how you should gamble.

If this newsletter is about sports gambling, it will likely be about how we have lost our collective minds with the way the leagues have gone into business with the gambling companies and made an addictive and often damaging part of our culture so mainstream.

So even as I try to grow this business, I will join Defector and any of the few others who are not sponsored by DraftKings or FanDuel or whatever. And since this somehow needs to be said now, I also will not be sponsored by any "prediction markets."

Is this really a thing? Call it a prediction market, call it "trading on sports," and then we're supposed to accept this as something different from gambling, even though it seems to be the exact same thing as placing bets?

Here comes the big swear: what in the actual fuck is happening?

Right alongside the sports gambling companies, then, we are inundated by "prediction market" ads. LeBron James owns part of one of them, which we're all just cool with because it's "trading," apparently.

That's insane. He is a current player and one of the biggest stars in all of sports, and he has a stake in one of the companies making money off sports gambling.

Silly me. What I should have said is that LeBron James, a current NBA player and one of the biggest stars in the league, will make money when people "trade on sports."

That sucks. This all sucks. A big damn problem is coming as a result of all of this. The only question is what form it will take and what league will have to deal with a huge and awful scandal.

I'm not linking to any of these companies. You have already seen the ads, everywhere, all the time.

Anyway, this newsletter is not sponsored by DraftKings, and it never will be.

🏈 Ethan Evans is the punter for the Los Angeles Rams. He almost enjoyed an unexpected moment as the hero this past Sunday, knocking home the go-ahead extra point while serving as the emergency kicker. Instead, the Ram choked the game away and fell to a surprising 2-4 record. Almost heroic, like so many of us feel. So it goes (ESPN).

📰 At least it's not everyone who is cool with all of this sports gambling noise. Nicole Noren was a longtime ESPN producer who quit because of the company's decision to partner with gambling companies (Columbia Journalism Review).

😠 If you aren't familiar with the whole deal with LeBron James and his ownership of a gambling company prediction market, here's an explainer (Defector $).

😡 If you need any further convincing that prediction markets of any kind are vile, here is a story about people betting "trading" on sexual assault cases (Front Office Sports).

⚾ Hoping to further make my case that more fans should be excited about this World Series, Patrick Dubuque described it this way: “But the reality is that Tampa Bay, much like Milwaukee, is a fascinating team, an almost perfect combination of speed, defense, contact, and power, little of it overlapping” (Baseball Prospectus).

🧢 One more fun piece about the teams in this World Series: Devon Henderson wrote about the story behind the iconic Brewers logo, which dates back to the winner of an art contest in the 1970s (The Athletic $).

A superstar and the feeling

Let’s close this out with one more thought on Will Ospreay and what it looks like when a league or promotion has a star (or a STAR, to go all-caps like Joe did in his article).

This was Ospreay’s entrance when he won the World Championship earlier this year in front of his home crowd in Wembley Stadium.

Between that entrance and his remarkable performances in the ring, Ospreay is the kind of star that can bring in the non-sickos.

And if anyone ever asks you what Junior Caminero has in common with Will Ospreay, you can send them this newsletter.