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 –0.9% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 4,967 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. FiveThirtyEight’s models are heavily used in making NBA and soccer futures picks. FanGraphs is heavily used in making MLB picks. Our NHL picks are based on Gelo, our own model.
Just the two markets again today. We’re still biding our time with the NHL and NBA portfolios. If the Knights and Heat both win their series, our all-time balance will be +0.87 units, bringing us back profitable overall for the first time in more than a year. So, we aren’t going to mess with that possibility, especially with the most likely scenario—the Knights and Nuggets winning—a profitable one for us from here.
On single-game MLB bets: On the season, we’re 41–30, we’re up 5.53 units, we’re up 8% (the average line on our winners has been –115). April was great, May was bad, June is young but we’re profitable on it so far.
For the MLB futures: We began the season with 750 units in our MLB futures portfolio, with the intent being to spend 500 of those over the regular season and keep 250 in reserve for the postseason and/or hedging & arbitrage opportunities. This is circular, because we use FanGraphs probabilities to guide our picks, but if we use FanGraphs probabilities and include today’s plays, our mean expected return on the 750 units based on what we’ve bet so far is 82.44 units, or 7.9%.
Cincinnati @ St. Louis
Are the Cardinals broken?
It’s a fair question, the original NL Central favorite mired in last place in the division and half a game out of last place in the National League. One thing with the Cardinals, though, is that their overperformance with a risky recipe these last few years (they’ve leaned heavily on aging stars) alongside Yadier Molina’s tough-to-quantify career as a pitching aide left them as a suspicious favorite in the first place. In other words: Maybe this isn’t far off how good this roster should be.
What would that say about tonight? Not a lot in either direction, but that’s enough for us. When we ask these sorts of questions, we’re really looking for red flags: Is there something models are missing on this team that markets are seeing? We don’t think so. We think markets are seeing a ghost, and that the Elly De La Cruz hype and Ben Lively’s solid small-sample performance so far (after not cracking the 2022 Reds’ MLB pitching staff even one time) have the market following that ghost even harder.
The Cardinals aren’t broken.
They just aren’t a great team.
Pick: St. Louis to win –164. Low confidence. (Lively and Montgomery must start.)
NL Central
We could corner the NL Central right now if we wanted to, but that would require taking what we think is a bad-value bet on the Reds. Instead, we’ll double up on the Brewers, helping our regular season baseline scenario. Our only real risk right now is the Guardians, but they’re so close to positive-value that we may be able to stop that next week. Behind the Guards, it’s the Blue Jays, and FanGraphs and the markets both have them at least three times less likely than Cleveland to win a division, checking in at 6.5% on FanGraphs and less than 10% in the markets.
Pick: Milwaukee to win –140. Medium confidence.
Pick: Milwaukee to win –140. Medium confidence.
