The Los Angeles Dodgers have newly-minted jewelry and, oh yeah, they’re just as good as they were last year, if not better. Los Angeles’ 8-0 start to the 2025 season marks the best start to the season by a reigning World Series champion.
Scarily enough, there’s still room for improvement. The Dodgers’ marquee offseason acquisition, pitcher Roki Sasaki, has struggled mightily to open his MLB career. 2020 NL MVP Freddie Freeman has barely played and is on the injured list after re-injuring his surgically-repaired right ankle in a freak accident. 2018 AL MVP Mookie Betts is still working his way back after an illness that caused him to lose nearly 20 pounds, although he hasn’t shown any adverse effects. Oh, and three-time MVP Shohei Ohtani hasn’t pitched yet.
Los Angeles will try to improve to 9-0 tonight in its first road game of the season, when it takes on the Philadelphia Phillies at 6:45 p.m. ET in the City of Brotherly Love.
On DraftKings Sportsbook, the Dodgers are 1.5-run favorites and the total is set for 8. Below, I’ve highlighted my favorite prop bets centered around Betts.
Best Mookie Betts Prop Bets on DraftKings Sportsbook
Mookie Betts 1+ Home Runs (+400)
+400 odds for Betts to homer are disrespectful, given that he’s hit a long ball in two of his five games so far this season. Of course, he’s not going to maintain a pace of 0.6 homers per game for the rest of the season — in his average season (133 games), that’d mean he’d break Barry Bonds’ single-season home run record by hitting 80 bombs — but it’s not like he doesn’t have significant power, especially for a five-foot-10, 180-pound player. He’s recorded 35 or more home runs twice in his past three seasons.
Jesús Luzardo is also somewhat prone to the long ball. For his career, the southpaw has conceded 1.3 homers per nine innings, which would’ve been the 14th-worst figure among 59 qualified pitchers last season, and he conceded a two-run shot to the Washington Nationals’ Keibert Ruiz in his first start of the season. In 2024, his hard-hit percentage ranked in just the 29th percentile. The Venezuelan has also been somewhat worse against righties than lefties in his seven-season career, allowing a .743 OPS and 62 of his 72 career homers allowed to right-handed batters. Also, Betts was especially stellar against fastballs in 2024, hitting .327 against the pitch, and Luzardo throws fastballs 36% of the time.
Mookie Betts O0.5 Walks (Batter) (+120)
Luzardo also issued walks at a slightly above league-average rate in 2024, posting a walk percentage of 8.0%, right in line with the league average for all pitchers but a figure that would’ve ranked as the 15th-highest among 59 qualified pitchers if he’d thrown enough innings. He threw some 52% of his pitches outside the strike zone in 2024, according to Statcast, and while that worked to incentivize swings on 27% of pitches in the his preferred lower outside corner — where he threw 22% of his pitches to right-handers, it might not work against Betts, who ranked in the 93rd percentile in chase rate in 2024. Betts has only walked once so far this season, but he ranked 12th in walk percentage among 230 qualified batters last season.
