The sun shall always rise in the east, and it seems Major League Baseball’s marquee talent shall always land in the west. The Los Angeles Dodgers’ acquisition of Tarik Skubal shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but it did move the World Series favorites from +175 to +150 at major sportsbooks like DraftKings — eye-catching movement given the statistical longshot L.A. faces.Back-to-back champions, the Dodgers entered the season with +225 odds to win another title. Only one (!) team in history with preseason odds of +250 has actually won the series, though: the 1999 New York Yankees, who were preseason favorites nine years in a row and only won the final game of the season twice in that time. No National League team has won the World Series three times in a row, either.This isn’t to throw cold water on the Dodgers’ title hopes. Rather, it’s to explain that even in the face of historical improbability, oddsmakers have no choice but to price them this close to mathematical certainty.For context, the Dodgers’ odds give them an implied probability of 40 percent to win the World Series. The Yankees have the second-best chance at around 12 percent while the Milwaukee Brewers have the third-best at just shy of 10 percent.