Brewers Won the Games, Dodgers Own the Odds
Milwaukee finished the regular season with the best record in baseball, 103-59, the top seed in the National League and a bye straight into the Division Series. None of that stopped the Dodgers from opening as favorites for a third straight championship. DraftKings has Los Angeles at +200, BetMGM +210 and FanDuel +230, all three books putting more faith in a 100-62 team seeded second in its own league than in the one that just won 103 games outright.
The gap says more about recent history than about this regular season. The Dodgers have won the last two World Series, and until someone actually beats them in October, sportsbooks are treating that streak as the safer bet. Milwaukee sits second on the boards at +500 to +600, a number that still undersells a roster built around Jacob Misiorowski, the early favorite for the NL Cy Young. The Brewers have never won a World Series in franchise history, and this is the best position they have been in to end that.
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A Lopsided AL and a 100-Loss Turnaround
The American League bracket has its own oddity near the bottom. Tampa Bay took the top seed, Cleveland the second after a strong Central campaign, and Houston backed into the division title at a modest 81-81, one of the softest division-winning records in recent postseason memory. New York, Boston and the White Sox fill the three wild-card spots, with the Yankees missing out on the AL East again after Tampa Bay held them off down the stretch.
Chicago’s presence is the real outlier of the bracket. The White Sox are in the playoffs after back-to-back 100-loss seasons, a collapse-to-contender jump that sportsbooks are not buying yet, with World Series odds sitting between +3500 and +4000, longest of any qualifier. On the National League side, Atlanta takes the third seed while the wild cards go to Philadelphia, which stumbled through a rough final week to hang on, San Diego, and a Cubs team still chasing a title that has eluded the franchise for more than a century.
Tampa Bay and the Yankees round out the top four in the World Series odds, both sitting well behind the Dodgers and Brewers despite neither one having won its own division. For a field with six teams that spent September fighting just to get in, the gap between the best record in the sport and the favorite to win it all is the story heading into October.
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