It’s passed around sometimes that you should never bet on the Yankees, Notre Dame, or the Dallas Cowboys—that sportsbooks hold such a liability on popular teams, due to their own fans placing bets, that there’s no chance of getting a favorable betting line. It’s possible this really is true. The vig (the surcharge you pay, making you bet eleven dollars to win ten on something where the two teams have equal odds) is large enough that books could theoretically shade towards the popular team’s side and still not be exposed to market correction on the unpopular opponent. What’s more likely is that it holds some truth, and that while it was never fully true, it used to hold more truth than it does right now. Why’s that? Let’s explain.
Every weekday morning, I wake up and check two things: FanGraphs’s Playoff Odds and the betting odds in MLB futures markets—who’ll win each division, who’ll win each pennant, who’ll win the World Series. I’ve done some version of this for the last three and a half years. It has gone well for me. Not spectacularly well—I’m writing this from an apartment, not a sprawling country estate—but well. Something like a 15% return, on average, unit to unit. I’ll write more about the process sometime, and you’re always encouraged to join us on these and similar endeavors in our Best Bets, but the point I’m trying to make is that FanGraphs’s Playoff Odds, in my experience, are a pretty great tool for identifying teams betting markets are, on the long run, undervaluing.
These teams come and go in swings, and they vary year to year and month to month and sometimes week to week. Each of the last two seasons, FanGraphs has seen consistent value on Atlanta to win the National League pennant for stretches of August and September after not seeing value on Atlanta early in the summer. Each of the last three seasons, FanGraphs has held little confidence in the St. Louis Cardinals. Sometimes, that value comes to fruition, sometimes, it doesn’t. Our Atlanta bets worked out tremendously last year. Our Atlanta bets crashed and burned over a four-day stretch in October of 2020. We were nearly wrecked by the Giants last year.
So far this season, one of the most consistently valuable teams in betting markets, using FanGraphs, has been the New York Yankees. The New York Yankees. Really. The paragon of hype. It has finally waned in recent days, as the team with a massive payroll and the best record in the sport has climbed four games ahead of the Rays and six games ahead of their most obvious rival in this race, the Toronto Blue Jays, but as I type that, I look again at my spreadsheet, and you can get the Yankees to win the AL East at 23-to-13 odds right now, which FanGraphs’s Playoff Odds bring out to a 22% expected positive return on investment. You can get the Yankees at 13-to-4 to win the AL pennant, for a 21% expected return. You can get the Yankees at 8-to-1 to win the World Series, for a meager 9% return, comparable to the average annually turned out by the S&P 500 (with a lot more risk, of course, which is why we build portfolios and hedge and all the other things those guys on Wall Street also do but without the drunkard treatment the press gives gamblers).
Either FanGraphs is wrong or the markets are wrong, and while it could certainly be FanGraphs, their track record is pretty darn good. Either way, sportsbooks evidently do not hold a particularly high liability on Yankees futures, judging by these odds. Which brings us to our real question, and to our answer to why the old advice about betting against the Yankees may have been truer in the older days.
National baseball media is scattered right now. There are baseball shows, there’s an entire baseball channel, there are national baseball writers for various sports media publications. But these are not the 80’s or 90’s, and they’re not the mid-2000’s. ESPN is not broadcasting Baseball Tonight nightly anymore, and I am not entirely sure Sports Illustrated is still in print. Baseball media has grown, but it’s grown outwards, not upwards. The Athletic has one or more writers focused on each team. Upwards of half a dozen significant blogs exist dedicated to each team. Through MLB TV, you can watch every local broadcast in the country (besides your own, for which you’ll need a conventional local TV subscription, but that’s beside the point). It’s easier than ever to follow a single team closely, and the result of this is that we’ve pivoted away from these big national baseball storylines.
This is especially true with younger fans, who—though not as significant in number as baseball’s older fans—drive a lot of the conversation. Baseball, like NASCAR, has a large, old fanbase (more people watched NASCAR’s tenth-biggest race of the season on Sunday on a cable channel than watched Formula 1’s simultaneous premier event for American fans on network television; try explaining that to your Drive to Survive-obsessed friends). But younger fanbases drive sports media conversation. Because sports media members skew younger. Because social media users skew younger. Because younger people are the most valuable targets for advertisements (“the all-important 18-49 demographic”).
Baseball, in my generation, is not the mainstream sport. That’s football. That’s the NFL. Most everyone knows of the NFL’s biggest stars. Most everyone knows when the Super Bowl is happening. The leagues are closer in revenue than appearances might suggest (it helps to have a 162-game regular season and a championship format which lasts four to seven games), but the NFL, in my generation, is mainstream, while baseball, in my generation, is niche. Baseball’s equivalent to Tom Brady, in terms of attention garnered, used to be the Yankees, but then the Yankees stopped winning. Baseball’s equivalent to Aaron Rodgers, in terms of attention garnered, used to be the Red Sox and the Cubs, but then the Red Sox and Cubs started winning. There are more and more things going on here—I’m sure theses have been or are being written on the subject at universities nationwide—and the Yankees not making the World Series for a little over a decade does factor in, but what’s really happening is not that America isn’t paying attention to the Yankees, and it’s not even exactly that America isn’t paying attention to baseball. It’s that American media is not having national conversations about baseball. Not about the Yankees. Not about anyone else. It’s having local conversations instead, or segmented conversations tailoring to one specific kind of baseball fan—some to one who likes flash, some to one who likes statistics, some to one who likes humor, some to one who likes a particular brand of cultural representation (from good-old-boy to KBO import).
This is not necessarily a good or a bad thing. There’s good to it—we aren’t subject to the MJ vs. LeBron-style nonsense that comes when there are national conversations but too much time to fill with them—and there’s bad—the 50+ demographic will eventually die out, and the 18-49 demographic will be left, and baseball may hurt through that—but there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the absence of those national conversations. It’s just different. And one byproduct of the difference seems to be that you can make money on the Yankees these days.
The Cubs Got Scrappy
A lot happened yesterday for the Cubs. Nico Hoerner sprained his ankle colliding with an umpire in the middle of the outfield with nobody near. Frank Schwindel made the Padres’ starter throw him eleven pitches and ended the at-bat with a double off the wall to give the Cubs a strong early lead. Scott Effross had to deal with the defense allowing four straight guys on base through no fault of his own. Willson Contreras continued to rake. Rowan Wick recorded a six-out save. The Cubs won the series.
It was a wild game, but the Cubs kept bouncing back, and they finished off what was a lively three games for them with a big win. The Padres are a good team. It wouldn’t be shocking for them to enter the postseason the favorite in the National League, even if they aren’t all that close to that right now. They’re still very much their 2020 selves, and even their early-stage 2021 selves. Or at least, they have that in them.
This isn’t to say we should hop on a Cubs hype train or anything like that. It’s just to celebrate a good performance by guys who’ve been grinding and broke through. Nice off day for them today. Got kind of glossed over that they had to fly out to the West Coast after a Sunday night game to start the week.
The Hoerner situation is bad, and potentially really bad. X-rays were negative, but sprains can be rather severe, and even if it isn’t severe, he was really flourishing heading into that collision and now takes at least a small break. The guy’s spent so much time on the IL in his young career, and while another notable incident was due to another collision in the outfield, you don’t really have to go through the injury-prone discussion to acknowledge the developmental frustration with having a promising young shortstop miss a ton of regular at-bats as he enters what should be his prime. Hopefully he’s ok.
Also heading to the IL are Sean Newcomb (sprained his ankle shagging fly balls) and, at the minor league level, Brennen Davis. Davis is the Cubs’ most important prospect. Doesn’t have the highest ceiling of the farm system, but he’s the closest to being ready and his ceiling is high despite not being the single highest. It’s a nagging back thing, which could be great (can go away fast, some can be solved long-term with good stretching and all that) or could be very bad (back issues can nag for a long, long time and don’t exactly improve with age). So, more concerns there. Mark Leiter Jr. was called back up to replace Newcomb, who you really feel for at this stage of his career—out of minor league options, back-end bullpen reclamation project, turns 29 in a month and could be entering a game of bounce-around-or-retire. A fluke injury on top of that is harsh.
Eliminating College Football Divisions Might Backfire on Conferences
There’s a good amount of college football buzz right now about conference scheduling methods, at least by this month’s standards (there is so little college football news at the moment that the top four stories on The Athletic’s college football page are: 1) Speculation about QB targets in the 2023 NFL draft; 2) Speculation about what a program might do when its coach eventually retires, possibly years from now; 3) A rundown from an interview with the ACC Commissioner about operational stuff, like scheduling and breaking away from the NCAA; and 4) The seven-millionth piece about the recruitment of a quarterback entering his senior season…of high school).
The story with the conference scheduling methods is that as conferences have ballooned in size, playing every team in your division every year and gradually rotating through the opposite division no longer makes sense. Players, right now, sometimes do not play a specific conference opponent a single time during their four years on campus. Conferences want to change that. This is overdue and good.
The non-story that should be a story with the conference scheduling methods is that the elimination of divisions—a natural accompaniment to these shifts—will result in more competitive conference championship games, which conferences might not actually want. Better ratings? Yes, probably, depends on the specific teams but on the aggregate, yes. But conferences need playoff appearances right now, and making your champion play too hard of a schedule can backfire. Playoff expansion could help sort this out, and it may be that this is a small-sample issue, but in the current setup, the SEC, ACC, and Big Ten have had the least trouble making the playoff, and those are also the leagues that have the most lopsided division breakdown, with the SEC West, Big Ten East, and ACC Atlantic routinely winning the league title game in the playoff era. The Iron Bowl has been riskier to Alabama most years than a neutral-site game with Florida.
Cam Holden: Resolution
Do you remember that weird Cam Holden story? In case not, Holden was a good guard on Towson’s NIT team who entered the transfer portal after the deadline, which meant he was going to have to sit out a year if he transferred anywhere (doubly weird was that he did it after transferring once already during college, and often-forgotten-fact the NCAA’s immediate-eligibility-for-transfers thing is only granted once in college). Yesterday, he said he’ll stay at Towson after all. Unclear what happened there, and now it’s likelier we’ll never know. I like to imagine there was ice cream involved.
In other news, Jelly Walker’s coming back to UAB after testing the NBA Draft waters. Cult hero, March Madness difference-maker in waiting, lots of fun for all involved.
Bobby the Buck
Maybe it’s my Midwestern situation misleading me, but is Bobby Portis becoming a nationwide favorite in the NBA? People love this guy. I’m not disagreeing with that evaluation, to be clear—I too enjoy me some Bobby Portis. It’s just fun to go online or have a conversation about the NBA or even listen to a podcast where the NBA is casually mentioned and hear people express their love for a dude. Bobby Portis, bringing the nation together.
It was a wild comeback for the Bucks, and the conventional wisdom says the Celtics should be done now, and the conventional wisdom might be right! Having a single player as great as Giannis Antetokounmpo makes for a pretty good fallback situation if other things aren’t working, and the Celtics’ running theme of putting it together and then not having it together and then putting it together highlights that a little bit. It helps if your best is better than your opponent’s best, but it also helps if your worst is better than their worst.
Are the Bucks going to win a second straight title? It’s a fun thought. Watching sports media play the are-they-a-dynasty game with the Milwaukee Bucks would be a good little change of pace, and if you’ve got a Bucks fan friend who has enough conscience to be worth your friendship, you can always knock ‘em down a little by asking where they’ll put the Grayson Allen statue.
Head-scratcher in Memphis, but if we’re just going off of things like perception and feelings, the Warriors are one of those teams that seems so comfortable that losing by 39 with a chance to clinch the series probably doesn’t bother them. Should it? I don’t know. Are they loose and confident? Are they arrogant and susceptible to upset? And what should we actually make of the Grizzlies’ performance without Ja Morant, which is the most significant instance now of a weird little regular-season theme? The simplest explanation for it all is that the Warriors will take the series at home and move on.
Hard to know what to expect tonight except that Philly will be rocking. Game 5 seems like a tough performance to bounce back from for the Sixers, and that illustrates the difference between their identity and that of the Warriors. Were the Warriors in this situation, it would feel a lot more natural to trust them to force Game 7. The Sixers don’t have that status, which may or may not actually indicate who or what they are. In Dallas, it’s easy to make too much of a small sample, but the Mavericks have won the games where they’ve held the Suns below 109, which sounds like it should elicit a ”duh” but feels more significant when you consider the Mavericks lost two of their three games where they scored 109 or more. They’ve lost both barn burners this series, for whatever it’s worth.
Clinchers?
On the ice, the Hurricanes and Leafs try to clinch on the road while the Blues and Kings try to clinch at home in a set of four Games 6. Fun night ahead. The Kings are the biggest underdogs, but the Oilers still have to win two to win that series, which complicates expectations a bit. The probability lesson would have the Oilers win tonight but the Kings win tomorrow.
It would seem the most pressure is on the Canes, who have cleaned up at home but are also the only team playing tonight who held a 2-0 series lead. It would seem the most entertaining game would be Leafs vs. Lightning, with two strong offenses and visible Stanley Cup possibilities continuing to go at it. It would seem the best-narratived game would be Oilers vs. Kings, where the Kings are trying to stun and the Oilers have some heartbreak to try to erase. The most consequential game may turn out to be Wild vs. Blues, for reasons we’ve been sharing (Gelo doesn’t like the Avalanche, guys). Fun night ahead.
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Viewing schedule tonight (second screen rotation in italics, there’s plenty of day baseball but you wouldn’t prioritize any of it over an average MLB game unless you have a particular rooting interest):
- 7:00 PM EDT: Heat @ 76ers (ESPN)
- 7:00 PM EDT: Hurricanes @ Bruins (TNT)
- 7:30 PM EDT: Maple Leafs @ Lightning (TBS)
- 8:10 PM EDT: Yankees @ White Sox, Gil vs. Cease (MLB TV)
- 9:30 PM EDT: Wild @ Blues (TNT)
- 9:30 PM EDT: Suns @ Mavericks (ESPN)
- 10:00 PM EDT: Oilers @ Kings (TBS)
- 10:10 PM EDT: Phillies @ Dodgers, Wheeler vs. Anderson (MLB TV)
