ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. | All of this makes Matt Garza smile.</p><p>Oh, it&#8217;s easy to smile for Garza right now. He&#8217;s the MVP of the AL Championship Series and the Tampa Bay Rays&#8217; ace <em>du jour</em>. But he especially likes that his Rays are here, in this storybook World Series, with a $44 million payroll stretched into 104 wins &#8212; and counting.</p><p>He likes to say that if the Red Sox were winning with pitching and defense, it&#8217;d be called traditional. When his Rays win like this, it&#8217;s called a Cinderella story.</p><p>So he smiles when you ask if the Royals could be the next Cinderella story.</p><p>&#8220;Definitely,&#8221; he says. &#8220;Kansas City&#8217;s got a great team over there. They gave us fits this year. There&#8217;s just got to be belief there.&#8221;</p><p>The Tampa/St. Petersburg TV market is significantly larger than Kansas City&#8217;s, and this was the first year since 1999 that the Rays outdrew the Royals. The Rays have the 29th-ranked payroll in baseball, the lowest for any World Series team in the 33 years of free-agency.</p><p>The Rays and Royals lost more games than any other team in the last decade. The Royals made the more aggressive personnel moves, spending a combined $91 million on Gil Meche and Jos&#233; Guillen while the three free agents on the Rays&#8217; World Series roster cost a total of $17 million.</p><p><em>Why can&#8217;t us? </em>reads a popular T-shirt for Phillies fans, and the people in Kansas City have a right to wonder the same thing now.</p><p>There is a general hope among Royals fans that player development and scouting and draft focus and all of general manager Dayton Moore&#8217;s favorite talking points are moving the franchise in the right direction.</p><p>But now, the Rays are changing the rules. The bar is up now, proof is here that small-market ways can lead to baseball&#8217;s biggest stage. No more excuses.</p><p>This is unlike what baseball has seen before, for several reasons.</p><p>&#8220;The fact they&#8217;ve been doing it since their inception speaks to how long it takes,&#8221; Moore says. &#8220;But eventually you&#8217;ll get it right. Eventually it&#8217;ll reward you. But you have to be patient, and your fan base has to understand it takes time.&#8221;</p><p>&#8226; &#8226; &#8226;</p><p>The easy way out is to say that, hey, of course the Rays are good by now. They&#8217;ve been picking at the top of the draft for so long, even a front office full of morons could build a winner eventually.</p><p>And maybe that&#8217;s partially true. But only partially. Evan Longoria, B.J. Upton and David Price each had the can&#8217;t-miss labels of being drafted in the top three picks. But that&#8217;s it.</p><p>The rest of the pieces have come with players who were available to any team. Carlos Pe&#241;a was a minor-league free agent, James Shields was a 16th-round draft pick, and Andy Sonnanstine went in the 13th round.</p><p>Most of the rest, like Scott Kazmir and Dioner Navarro and Dan Wheeler, came in trades that involved nonprospects and veterans with little value.</p><p>&#8220;We know our own players better than anybody else,&#8221; general manager Andrew Friedman says. &#8220;It&#8217;s valuable for us, because for us to sustain a competitive team for a number of years in the AL East, we need to be right more than we&#8217;re wrong.&#8221;</p><p>Friedman readily admits that luck is a big part of all this. He doesn&#8217;t mention their challenges in some ways were more difficult challenges than the Royals. Tampa Bay&#8217;s attendance, until this year, was consistently less than the Royals&#8217;.