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 Milwaukee is also considered a loss for its future book and that Tampa Bay being crowned champion would be a win.
That's not the case everywhere, particularly at Hard Rock Bet, Florida's only authorized online sports betting provider. From bettors within the state, 21.2% of the book's straight World Series tickets backed the Rays compared to just 7.7% of the bets in other states where the book operates.
However, Hard Rock also notes that bettors backing the Brewers are wagering more than double the average Rays wager, putting the book in something of a bind either way.
"We've seen a significant late surge in World Series money on Milwaukee, but Tampa Bay remains a major liability for us," Hard Rock Bet spokesperson Jon Chapper said in an email. "Rays fans, particularly in Florida, believed in their team long before October, and many locked in much longer odds earlier in the season. Those early tickets are a big reason Tampa Bay remains such a significant exposure for our book."
For all the talk of this being a small-market World Series, one other concern for sportsbooks might be how it affects overall cash flow, even if the rest of the postseason was a relative success.
"Knocking out the Dodgers and Yankees on a game-to-game basis was good for the house, but looking at the bigger picture, it's not great for handle," Biggio said. "A baseball nerd like myself would enjoy a potential Rays/Brewers series, but it definitely wouldn't draw the kind of handle the Dodgers/Yankees did a few years back."
The Brewers are favored on the moneyline for Game 1 in Milwaukee at -164, and Tampa Bay is +135. The over/under is set at 6 with elite pitchers Drew Rasmussen and Jacob Misiorowski projected to be on the mound.