Editor’s Note: Joe Stunardi is our resident guy-who-knows-numbers. He’d say that you shouldn’t read too much into it, since the sample size is only 182 completed bets (this doesn’t include outstanding futures picks), but his picks published here and back at All Things NIT have had an average return on investment of 1% when weighted by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high), meaning he’s about as successful as a bettor who wins 53% of their straight bets.
As always, use these picks at your own risk. Only you are responsible for any money you lose following Joe’s picks. At the same time, though, you’re also responsible for any money you win.
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Three picks today.
As always:
- Lines come from the Vegas Consensus at the time this is written.
- Fangraphs is great.
- The writeups for each pick aren’t justifications. The justification for each is that the numbers I’m using indicate its expected payout is positive by more than a standard deviation or two. The writeups are just words about the games.
San Diego @ Washington
A quick look at Max Scherzer’s season-to-date stats might be concerning for Nationals fans. He’s 1-3, and even if you’re past the point of putting much stock in a pitcher’s win-loss record, his ERA sits at 4.45. Not exactly bad, but much worse than we’re accustomed to seeing from Scherzer.
Luckily (or unluckily, depending how you feel about the Nationals), there’s no need to fear. Scherzer’s opponents are hitting .395 against him on balls in play, which is contributing to a very strong FIP of 2.25, suggesting something scary for the NL East:
Through a small sample size, Max Scherzer is pitching better than ever.
His strikeout numbers are in line with last year’s. His walk numbers are the best they’ve been since 2015. Through five outings, he’s put in about the same number of innings per start.
Max Scherzer might be getting older, but he’s showing no signs of slowing down.
Pick: Washington to win -180. Low confidence.
Pittsburgh @ Los Angeles
In 2015, it looked like Chris Archer was well on his way to being one of baseball’s best pitchers. He was putting up over ten K’s per nine innings, walking fewer than three per nine, and he did it all across a 200+ inning season.
Since then, he hasn’t quite been what he was. His strikeout and walk numbers have stayed close to those 2015 thresholds, but his performance has worsened.
So what’s the problem? Well, since it doesn’t seem to be strikeouts or walks, it has to either involve the timeliness of hitting (how many runners is Archer stranding on the basepaths) or what’s happening when balls are put in play. So which is it?
Well, looking at Archer’s opponents home run numbers, the answer is balls in play. Or rather, balls that he managed to keep in play in 2015 but hasn’t since.
Yes, Archer, like many pitchers, started giving up more home runs in 2016 than he did in 2015 (and prior). The jump in his numbers, though, was greater than that of the rest of the league, going from 0.81 HR/9 innings in 2015 to 1.34 in 2016, a whopping 65% increase. Almost all of that came not from an increase in fly balls themselves, but from an increase in which fly balls made it out of the park (56% more of them in 2016 than 2015).
There are a number of possible explanations for this, all of which could be explored in a longer piece of research than this (which may be coming Sunday—we’ll see how the weekend looks), but my best guess is that the culprit is a mix between Archer allowing harder contact than before and the league-wide changes in home run frequency. That’s a safe guess, and a wide-ranging guess, but it’s there.
Since 2016, the numbers have settled back down a bit, but Archer remains a similar pitcher to what he was in 2017 and 2018. If he’s going to ever be the pitcher 2015 promised he would be, home runs seem to be the thing to fix.
Pick: Pittsburgh to win +155. Low confidence.
New York (AL) @ San Francisco
The numbers keep saying to pick the Yankees, which, since I’m using Fangraphs for a lot of these numbers, implies that Fangraphs is higher on the Yankees than oddsmakers.
What’s driving this? It’s hard to say, without knowing how Fangraphs calculates their projections, but Occam’s razor points to the injuries. The Yankees, as you have likely heard if you’ve set metaphorical foot near a national baseball news outlet this month, have a lot of injured players. So many, in fact, that they’re doing things like buying Cameron Maybin from the Indians.
That isn’t to say that Maybin’s a bad pickup. Depending on how you feel about players charged with a DUI a month and a half ago playing for the Yankees, your feelings will vary on the moral piece, but from a purely on-field standpoint, Maybin makes sense. He plays the outfield. The Yankees have four outfielders on the IL. But the fact that the Yankees are now at the point where they’re having to go buy players from other teams, like a family running next door for a cup of sugar, highlights how busy the training staff has become.
But looking back at the Fangraphs/Vegas discrepancy (which, it should be noted, is anecdotal, but this is the 8th Yankees pick, out of 39 total this season, which suggests something’s going on), the logic with why each would view injuries differently is this: Fangraphs, I assume, is using equations that include no subjective variables. Only measurable things are included. Vegas, contrarily, can look at an injury situation and place an educated bet on the Yankees being rattled, or chemistry not meshing, or any one of the other variables that likely exist but are impossible to mathematically predict with precision.
Anyway, the Yankees have a lot of injuries but the numbers say they’re more likely to win tonight than Vegas suggests.
Pick: New York (AL) to win -130. Low confidence.
