Boston and TB beastly this year with great pitching. This hurts their chances a lot.
Also, when you're that team that "wins a lot of 1-run games", it usually doesn't bode well going forward, especially when you lose your closer.
To keep being negative and discouraging, there is MASSIVE amounts of juice on futures bets, because the books know 99.999% of bettors won't math it out and see. In other words, Baltimore is probably more realistically a 23-1 shot to win the pennant, but the crafty bookmakers know you'll see 17-1 and think it's value. This saves/makes the books millions overall every year. It always made me laugh when people would say "Oh, the books are shaking because x amount of people had Auburn to win it all at 500-1" No they're not. They'll pay a small percentage of what they raked in from everyone else betting every other team to win it all. Futures bets are a license to print money for the books. They only wish it could happen more often.
The only bets like this I'll ever play are season ovr/und, and I'll only spot bet it if I see something crazy. Florida Gators UND 10 was my only NCAAF bet like this, and I'm waiting to see what the Mariners total is so I can pound the UND there too if possible.