Baseball isn’t my ministry, but you’re reading this because it’s yours.
With the League Championship Series sown up, the Tampa Bay Rays and Los Angeles Dodgers are set to face off in the World Series after each team dominated the regular season. And with names like Mookie Betts, Randy Arozarena and Clayton Kershaw set to clash for the crown, social media has been abuzz with fans foaming at the mouth for a good series.
ESPN reports that the Dodgers have been christened the early favorites to win the series, with the Rays tapped as underdogs:
After the Dodgers finished off the Atlanta Braves on Sunday, sportsbook operator William Hill U.S. made the Dodgers -210 favorites to beat the Rays in the series, which begins Tuesday. By Monday morning, the consensus price to bet the Dodgers had settled at -195, with the underdog Rays fetching +165 odds.
When the revised season was announced in June, the Dodgers were listed as co-favorites with the New York Yankees to win the World Series. The Dodgers remained at the top of oddsboards throughout the abbreviated regular season and have been the betting favorite in every game, including in the postseason. They became the eighth team to overcome a 3-1 deficit to win a league championship series and are now headed to the franchise’s 21st World Series.
This will be the first World Series to be played at a neutral site—the Texas Rangers’ brand spanking new Globe Life Field—and while it will have fans in attendance, it won’t have an all too familiar sight in recent years: the Houston Astros.
For those out of the loop, the punk ass Astros got caught up in a nasty cheating scandal in which the team was found to have concocted an elaborate sign-stealing scheme that they used during their 2017 championship season. It consisted of using “a camera fixated on the catcher’s signs, a monitor with a live feed in the tunnel between the dugout and the clubhouse, and by banging nearby garbage cans to relay the signs to the hitter,” per CBS Sports.
After MLB conducted a thorough investigation, the punishments—suspensions, historic fines and the forfeiture of draft picks—were ugly, but oddly enough, the league declined to strip the Astros of their title—which is some bullshit.
So, fuck the Astros.
This is the Rays’ first World Series berth since 2008 and only their second ever in franchise history, while the Dodgers will be going to the World Series for the third time in the past four years. This is also only the fourth time since 1995 that the teams with the best record in each league are facing off in the World Series.
The fun begins on Tuesday, with Game 2 scheduled for Wednesday. And with me being a Los Angeles resident, you already know I’m rocking with the Dodgers.