Editor’s Note: Since November 2018, Joe has been publishing picks here and back at All Things NIT, our former site. Overall, the results have been mixed, with an average return on investment, per pick, of –0.7% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 5,069 published picks, not including pending futures, and an average return on investment, per pick, of +3.1% across 1,617 completed high and medium-confidence picks (low confidence picks, these days, are in experimental markets for us).
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’re afraid you might have a gambling problem, seek help.
Odds for these come the better option between Bovada and BetOnline. We used to use the Vegas Consensus, but it’s no longer consistently available in an accurate form online. FanGraphs is heavily used in making MLB picks.
Just the moneyline again today. Trying to bet the futures right now feels like it could be advantageous, but we’re seeing books use harsher odds across the board and not all books even have the markets open. Futures should return tomorrow, and we should have just two remaining weekdays off then over the rest of the regular season.
Single-game MLB bets: On the season, we’re 66–50–4, we’re up 12.94 units, we’re up 11% (the average line on our winners has been –105). April was great, May was bad, June was good, July was great.
Cincinnati @ Chicago (NL)
We don’t see any lines which fit our normal parameters today, and with the trade deadline further jamming up the works, that has us doing some intuiting, which is a dangerous game. The two lines which look best to us are this one and Houston’s, and we’re choosing this one partly because it’s the longer of the two (if we’re going out on a limb these days, we at least want some payout for our efforts). Beyond that, we do believe that baseball series work in patterns, and the pattern we’d expect from two division contenders playing one another would involve the better of the two on paper bouncing back after a close loss in the series opener. The Reds tired more bullpen value last night, the Cubs did more deadline adding, Justin Steele has been really good. Ben Lively is what would normally take this off our board—when a guy’s FIP and xERA are both outperforming his FanGraphs Depth Charts FIP projection, we don’t like betting against him—but we do think the Reds rotation as a whole is being overvalued by markets and should be expected to regress, something we believe we saw the start of with Andrew Abbott last night.
This appears to be our best option today. Here’s hoping it starts August for us with a win.
Pick: Chicago (NL) to win –161. Low confidence. (Lively and Steele must start.)
