Brewers, Rays carry sportsbook liability into World Series - ESPN

After beginning the regular season as long championship underdogs, the Milwaukee Brewers and Tampa Bay Rays will carry sportsbook liability with them into the 2026 World Series.

Milwaukee (-160) is favored to defeat Tampa Bay (+140) as the teams face off, each seeking its club's first title, the first such World Series since 1980. According to betting futures, the matchup is even more remarkable given the Brewers began the season with 14th-best 35-1 odds, while the Rays started at a 22nd-best 80-1, according to DraftKings lines.

If Tampa Bay were to finish the campaign off with a title, it would tie the 1991 Minnesota Twins for the longest preseason underdog to win a World Series, according to data from SportsOddsHistory.com.

The long odds early in the year for both teams meant that liability built up quickly for sportsbooks as bettors piled on. At those big plus-money numbers, it doesn't take as many bets for liability to accumulate as it would for a favorite like the Los Angeles Dodgers, who were in the +200 range all season before being eliminated by Milwaukee in the National League Championship Series.

Caesars Sportsbook told ESPN before the postseason that the Brewers had become a liability due to some late-season action backing them as a more contrarian World Series pick. That's still the case, but Milwaukee also assisted sportsbooks through its wins in the playoffs.

«The Brewers are still a loss for the house overall on the World Series futures,» the sportsbook's head of baseball, Eric Biggio, told ESPN over email more recently. «They helped us out, though, on a game-to-game basis against the Dodgers, as well as knocking out the Padres, who were a big liability for us in the futures market.»

BetMGM notes that