Editor’s Note: For about two and a half years now, Joe has been publishing picks here and back at All Things NIT, our former site. There have been moments of elation (the Nationals winning the 2019 World Series, the first two months of the 2019-20 college basketball season). There have been moments of frustration (the Dodgers’ 2020 NLCS comeback, the second two months of the 2019-20 college basketball season). Overall, the results have been positive, with an average return on investment, per pick, of 0.6% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 1,486 published picks, not including pending futures. And while 0.6% might not sound enormous, you can do a lot with it over time.
Use these picks at your own risk. Only you are responsible for any money you lose, and you should not bet more than you can afford to lose. If you have a gambling problem, get help.
Lines for these come from the Vegas consensus or the closest approximation available at the time picks are written, unless otherwise noted. FanGraphs is heavily used in making MLB picks.
Colorado @ San Diego
Alright, let’s get really transparent.
The guiding idea behind these published bets is that the average return needs to stay positive. If we don’t do that, we lose any credibility we have and these become simply an exercise in entertainment, in which case we hand it over to Stu and he publishes them based on things like his impression of the vibe at Wrigley, which teams have less beef with Joe Kelly, and which coach has had more NIT success. So, to be allowed to publish these (by myself), I have to stay positive (numerically, not emotionally, though back to that vibe idea…).
With the way our MLB futures portfolio is currently structured, it’s rather likely that we’ll get some good units at the beginning of October when the division championships pay out. This could change—the Rays are a hole, the Giants are a hole, there are other possible outcomes that aren’t slam dunks for us (Blue Jays, Yankees, a couple others technically)—but we’ve got better than a 90% chance of profiting, with a median profit of something like 16 units top-of-my-head, which should be enough to float us through October and into college basketball season, where we’re traditionally strong in non-conference play.
In the meantime, I’d like to take some shots at college football in September, having a rather scattered approach these past three years and wanting to try something more refined. There are six weeks of football before the baseball regular season concludes (that count includes Week Zero), so I’m trying to stay more than five units above even in total right now (so I could lose all six and get bailed out by the division payouts and never have to publish that we have a negative average ROI). As of this morning, I’m at 9.34 above even. So I have about a four-unit cushion upon my cushion.
We’ve had some success before the trade deadline with MLB daily picks. It’s been inconsistent (the model we use has some evident issues, our attempt to build our own model to circumvent those hasn’t gone the best), but it’s been good enough to justify continuing to try. After the trade deadline, though, we’re terrible. Awful. Atrocious. So, so, so bad. Sorry. I tried to stop it. It happened. Some of you lost bets because of it. I lost bets because of it. That’s how betting seems to go, it seems much more cyclical than I would guess.
The nice thing about being atrocious at something, though, is that you learn a lot, and there’ve been a few signs these last two years that basically looking for can’t-lose games, which don’t exist in baseball and are therefore normally a fool’s errand, might not be a fool’s errand after the deadline. No, you’re not going to bat 1.000 on these, but if there’s a slight undervaluing of these due to market constraints, you only need to bat about 70% to be profiting on the realm of picks I’m looking at—games where a contender is playing a non-contender, is a 65%+ favorite, and there are no red flags (tired bullpen, getaway day in some instances, underperforming starter, team already clinched, etc.). It might not work. But if it fails, it should be a slow-enough burn that it shouldn’t incinerate us, and in the meantime we’ll be focusing heavily on that futures portfolio as things come down to the wire and some opportunities probably open up with the LCS’s and the World Series.
So, with all that established and the trade deadline still a day away, we’re starting early. Nothing looks good on the board, I missed futures this morning because I was doing trade deadline work (and helping with the dinosaur bracket), and this fits the profile of a “can’t-lose” game, which is to say it’s probably 71% likely the Padres win and it might be 75% likely if what I’ve gathered these last two seasons is correct and games like this are undervalued. Low return, so low confidence, but on the back of that 0.6% number from these last two years and eight-plus months, I give it my admittedly maybe-not-worth-it blessing.
Pick: San Diego to win -280. Low confidence.
