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 –0.6% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 5,104 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. Movelor is heavily used in making college football picks.
One MLB moneyline today, two MLB futures, and one college football pick against the spread. Context on each market…
Single-game MLB bets: On the season, we’re 88–59–4, we’re up 21.25 units, we’re up 14% (the average line on our winners has been –110). We don’t have great history in September, but we didn’t have great history in August, and August was one of our two best months of the year.
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 75.05 units, or 10.0%
Single-game college football bets: On the season, we’re 2–2. We’re 2–1 on FBS games like tonight’s.
Toronto @ Colorado
I’m not sure what’s going on with this line, but I’m thinking it may be concerns about the Blue Jays’ numerous injuries. If it’s that, the concerns are overweighted compared to the on-paper value of the players down. So, the assumption then would have to be that the Blue Jays have some psychological thing going on or other injuries that aren’t taking players off the field, both of which seem like a stretch.
We’ll take Toronto.
Pick: Toronto to win –185. Low confidence. (Ryu and Flexen must start.)
World Series
We’re in on the Astros again, with value still there and the Astros still not a profitable scenario for us in the World Series portion of our portfolio. This does get them close—they’re within a unit now—but if the value’s still there next week, we’ll have one more of these plays to make.
Pick: Houston to win +750. Medium confidence.
Pick: Houston to win +750. Medium confidence.
Louisville vs. Georgia Tech
Movelor is very high on Louisville, having seen them pull off some dominant victories last year around Halloween (beat Wake Forest by 27, beat James Madison by 24) and not knowing anything about program turnover this offseason. The thing about that program turnover, though, is that Louisville isn’t losing any more production than Georgia Tech lost, and moving from Scott Satterfield at head coach to Jeff Brohm doesn’t feel like a significant change in overall quality—at least in any way we can confidently predict. In other words? I’m not sure Movelor’s wrong about the Cards.
Even if Movelor *is* wrong on the Cards, it has plenty of reasons to dislike a Georgia Tech team which climbed a long way after Brent Key took over as the interim but was still doing things like losing to Virginia and getting smoked by Miami when Miami didn’t make a bowl. When we say that we and Movelor are down on the ACC, we do mean that as a whole, but that’s functioning in a way which disproportionately divides us from the market and the narrative in a way where we like Louisville and don’t feel good about Georgia Tech. When the market and the narrative are moving the same direction, we feel good about our chances of being the ones that are right.
Numerically, for this line to make sense to Movelor, Louisville would have to be worse than Duke. It’s possible they are, but we don’t see it.
Pick: Louisville –7.5 (–105). Low confidence.
