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 -3.6% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 2,792 published picks, not including pending futures, and an average return on investment, per pick, of 0.3% across 762 completed high and medium-confidence picks.
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. For futures bets and motorsports bets, odds are taken from the better option between Bovada and BetOnline as our best approximation of the Vegas consensus, which isn’t currently/accurately available online. FanGraphs is heavily used in making MLB picks.
Below are our 17th and 18th futures of the MLB season. If you’re new to this, what we’re doing is investing 520 units over the course of the regular season (with 520 more units in reserve for hedging and the postseason) in an effort to get our all-time results back to a positive average return. We have our strongest history in MLB futures, hitting on a lot of Nationals picks in 2019 and plays across the board last year, with only a small loss in 2020. Currently, our focus is on breadth—we’re trying to diversify our portfolio in these early weeks to build a broad base. When a team on which we haven’t bet shows positive value in a given market, we take that bet. Which is what we’re doing today.
AL Central
Doubling up here, since the odds are shorter than even.
For the last two weeks, we’ve been fading the White Sox a little bit, placing futures on the Twins, Guardians, and even the Royals to win the Central. The market’s come around, though, and now there’s value on the south side.
This doesn’t lock up the Central for us—if the White Sox were to win the division, we’d still take a loss within AL Central plays. What it does do, though, is bring back some of that loss, and as a piece of a much larger puzzle than just the AL Central, it fits well. We get a small bet down on a division favorite (the heaviest in baseball, using FanGraphs’s Playoff Odds) that helps stabilize the portfolio. If the value’s still here tomorrow and newer value isn’t presenting itself, we may take it again, especially with our Guardians and Royals bets longer than 10-to-1 each.
Pick: Chicago to win -200. Medium confidence.
Pick: Chicago to win -200. Medium confidence.
