Inside Vegas: World Series Edition

According to the Vegas lines, the current odds for each team to win it all:

The Rockies are +200 to win the series at The Greek; according to these #s, you'll pretty much break even on that over the long run.

Obviously, the Red Sox are huge favorites. But the Rockies win this series about one third of the time, according to Vegas. So while it would be a pretty significant upset, it really wouldn't be that much of a shock.

With Beckett pitching at Fenway, the Sox are also huge favorites to win G1, at 65.8%. Combining this with the series odds, it looks like if BOS wins on Wednesday, they'll be up to about 76.7% to win the series; if COL wins, they'll actually be slight favorites, at 52.8%.

If you are confident in the Rockies, there is obviously money to be made here. 5Dimes has Colorado winning Game 1 by 7 or more runs at 22:1. And The Greek has a Rockies sweep at 25:1. I know they're not as good as the Red Sox, but they have won 21 of 22. Over their last 22 games, they've had a 11 game win streak and their current 10 game streak. The odds are obviously stacked against a Colorado sweep, but they've been defying logic for awhile now.

According to various sites (SportsBetting, Bodog, BetUS, The Greek), here are the "Series Result" percentages:

These are a completely different set of odds than the series odds, but Boston's total % is almost exactly the same, at 66.3%. What's amazing here is BOS has the top four percentages. A Red Sox sweep is more likely than any Colorado result.

Finally, I've seen WS MVP odds at three sites (The Greek, BetUS, SportsBetting). Here are the SB odds (click to enlarge):

Beckett was 7:1 on Tuesday afternoon, which seemed high, and that's now dropped to 5:1. The best odds you can get on him are 6:1 at BetUS. He was originally 8:1 at The Greek, but those odds have dropped all the way to 5:1 as well.

This doesn't surprise me- I thought he was a good bet to win the ALCS MVP (which actually proved to be good advice), and I don't see much being different here. He's the unquestionable ace on the heavy favorite, and he's building up quite an October resume. In his career he's now 5-2 with a 1.78 ERA in postseason 65.2 innings. That's even more impressive when you consider how poorly he pitched (6.1 IP, 6 R) in G1 of the '03 NLCS. Since then, he has a 1.03 ERA and 59:7 K:BB ratio in 52.1 innings.

Photo: Yahoo!