2025 MLB Betting Online
Hope springs eternal is the annual Major League Baseball mantra. Spring training is set to open for the 2025 season, and gamblers are eagerly researching the future market odds. But while love can be blind in the spring, baseball has a hard gravity of economic disparity. The 2024 World Series featured two mega-market power brands, with the Los Angeles Dodgers defeating the New York Yankees. The Dodgers and Yankees have two of the biggest payrolls again for the 2025 season. It is not a surprise that the Dodgers and Yankees are drawing strong future market appeal.
MLB Betting Lines
2025 MLB World Series Odds
| ODDS TO WIN THE WORLD SERIES 2025 |
| Arizona Diamondbacks +2766 |
Athletics +16651 |
Atlanta Braves +999 |
| Baltimore Orioles +1581 |
Boston Red Sox +2225 |
Chicago Cubs +3018 |
| Chicago White Sox +64566 |
Cincinnati Reds +6222 |
Cleveland Guardians +3513 |
| Colorado Rockies +60087 |
Detroit Tigers +3302 |
Houston Astros +2091 |
| Kansas City Royals +4667 |
Los Angeles Angels +22389 |
Los Angeles Dodgers +246 |
| Miami Marlins +37792 |
Milwaukee Brewers +4533 |
Minnesota Twins +3770 |
| New York Mets +1219 |
New York Yankees +702 |
Philadelphia Phillies +1053 |
| Pittsburgh Pirates +13962 |
St. Louis Cardinals +11585 |
San Diego Padres +1857 |
| San Francisco Giants +9323 |
Seattle Mariners +2415 |
Tampa Bay Rays +6524 |
| Texas Rangers +2791 |
Toronto Blue Jays +6313 |
Washington Nationals +20140 |
*Odds as of Monday, February 17, 11:00 AM ET
Something that Rob Manfred is also envisioning but would require the MLBPA to sign off on is creating a bundle of local media rights to sell to a streamer, with the revenue shared across the 30 clubs. In a battle that will pit small revenue and large revenue clubs, the ability to get all 30 to agree to such a deal seems unlikely. The likes of the Dodgers, Yankees, and Cubs see little upside. Still, if Manfred can get a large percentage of the league into a bundle, it provides additional centralized revenue to try to address some of the disparity.
Major League Baseball continues to see a growing disparity between the haves and have-nots of the 30 clubs. There are some ways to address it.
Let’s start with some general truths: not all sports leagues are the same. By baseball’s very design, salary caps that are in play in other sports don’t necessarily apply to baseball.
Skill players on offense can play the entire game in basketball and football, where game outcomes are more easily controlled. In baseball, star sluggers come to the plate every inning and a half or so. Your pitching ace is up in the rotation every four to five days.
For Major League Baseball, they see some additional issues. Whether it was timing, forward-thinking, or a combination of the two, when the late NFL commissioner Pete Rozell and AFL founder Lamar Hunt got their leagues to agree to collectively share in television revenue, it created some additional equity between low and large revenue-making clubs.
Although MLB would go on to have their national TV revenues centrally shared, local media rights created a significant disparity between the likes of the Yankees, Dodgers, Cubs, and Red Sox and those in smaller territories such as the Royals, Pirates, and Rays.
Addressing economic disparity to create a more even playing field in terms of player salaries is no easy solution. What the owners want and what the players want is distinctively different.
To start, a salary cap is a non-starter. Or rather, to get to a salary cap would require the owners locking out the players for a season or more. Such a work stoppage would harken to the ’94-’95 strike that wiped out the ’94 World Series and remains a stain on MLB.
Given the inroads in creating increased engagement through rule changes that have led to consecutive years of attendance increases and high interest in the most recent World Series, such a nuclear option would erode these gains.
So, for the owners, it really is going to boil down to trying to further squeeze within the framework now in place. That would likely take the form of increasing the penalties around the Luxury Tax system and things such as an international draft, which would put club controls around foreign players who are now signed as free agents.
As an example, over the course of the current labor deal, Luxury Tax penalties have risen nearly 300% from $78,489,606 in 2022 to $311,305,310 in 2024. Based on provisions within the CBA, the league will see hundreds of millions this off-season to allocate as revenue sharing on top of the centralized revenue sharing that comes with national TV rights, league sponsorship deals, etc. So, depending on whether the owners can gain continued changes around the Luxury Tax penalties, the pool could grow.
MLB Teams
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