By Only Players Staff
Updated 6/19/24 3:43am ET
Mookie Betts looked like a runaway winner for the NL MVP until a recent injury will keep him out up to eight weeks. Teammate Shohei Ohtani is now the +200 betting favorite.
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An automated transcript is listed below. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
A serious injury for one of the baseball’s best players, but we think it’s not going to derail his or his team’s season. Mookie Betts expected to miss six to eight weeks. Dodgers should be able to weather that storm. The question is, what impact does this have on the MVP odds and is there any betting value? Because Mookie, at the time of the injury, was flirting with minus money. That’s how dominant he had been to start this season, albeit the first half is where we still are.
So let’s look at the odds now. Mookie’s teammates, Shohei Ohtani, now your betting favorite at plus 200. Bryce Harper at plus 350. Then we get the double digits. Tatis Jr. and Ozuna at 10 to one. Freeman, another Dodger at 13 to one. And there’s old Mookie at 20 to one. So I asked an odds maker, I really respect it. If there’s any value on Mookie, sometimes he’s original injury. Timelines are just not really accurate. Mookie’s a stud, maybe he comes back early, so athletic, all that. And he just said, look, I don’t see it, because they’re not going to rush him back. The Dodgers should be comfortable in their division league, and they’re just not going to rush it because they’re playing the long game for the playoffs. Made sense. And he said he moved the odds to 100 to 1. So 100 to 1, I would take a nibble, because you never know. But yeah, you got to play a certain threshold in games. So I could see that.
I talked to another guy who’s really sharp, and he said, I need to do a deeper dive on this, but. He didn’t think that DH is automatically gonna run away with this. And he was referring to Ohtani, who’s the favorite. And he’s playing DH obviously, not the dual threat this season because he’s still recovering from his pitching issues. But I agree there, especially with Freeman right there, they could cannibalize each other. We talk about that all in sports and some of these MVP races.
I don’t have a value pick right now. I would sort of try to get ahead of the curve. You see a guy making a push maybe around the All -Star break. Marte sort of interests me. Maybe it’s a best player on a wild card team. This could be a weird year. We see teammates a lot here. We have Betts and then obviously Freeman and Ohtani. We’ll see. Harper certainly looks good, but 350, we can wait on that. So nothing right now, but it is interesting. It certainly opened the door for maybe hitting a somewhat medium or long shot play down the road.
