Bookie Busters

The Dodgers went wire-to-wire as baseball’s bully and slammed the door with a repeat—capped by Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s ice-veined masterpiece of a World Series. Three wins in the Fall Classic, the trophy, and the MVP: Yamamoto turned every leverage pocket into a clinic, throttling lineups with strike-one command and that disappearing splitter. L.A. didn’t just outslug people; they stacked run prevention, elite baserunning, and mistake-free defense on top of a rotation that kept handing the ball to a rested back end. That’s how dynasties behave.

For bookmakers, this was the outcome they didn’t want. The Dodgers were a short price almost all season, rarely drifting beyond 5-to-1 even during the summer—meaning public money had months to pile on futures, division parlays, and “repeat” promos. Liability snowballed as L.A. kept winning series and hoarding headlines; Toronto was the book’s preferred result, a cleaner balance with fewer preseason tickets and less parlay exposure. Even with in-series adjustments and live-bet offsets, the market never fully shook the red ink attached to Dodger tickets.

In the end, the most popular team with the most complete roster cashed. Yamamoto cemented legend status in one October, the Dodgers ran it back, and sportsbooks wore it.