Editor’s Note: Joe Stunardi is our resident guy-who-knows-numbers. He’d say this isn’t all that great, but over a sample size of 188 completed bets (this doesn’t include outstanding futures picks), 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.
Similarly, if you have a gambling problem, or even think you might have a gambling problem, get help. If you need help getting help, reach out to us at allthingsnit@gmail.com.
Three picks today.
As always:
- Lines come from the Vegas Consensus at the time this is written.
- Fangraphs, Baseball Reference, Baseball Savant, and Spotrac are all 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 teams playing the games.
Houston @ Minnesota
Jake Odorizzi has been consistently healthy since entering the majors full-time, starting 28 or more games in each of the last five seasons. Still, he has yet to eclipse 190 innings pitched, and in 2017 he didn’t even crack 145.
Have his managers been limiting his pitch count?
Maybe compared to the 1990’s, but not by today’s standards.
Last year, in a 32-start season, Odorizzi’s median pitch count was 99. Yet he only threw 164 and one third innings, averaging less than 16 outs per start.
He wasn’t a bad pitcher—his ERA was a respectable 4.49—but among qualified pitchers, he walked the sixth-most hitters per inning, suggesting that control, not health, is keeping Odorizzi from being one of the league’s best innings eaters.
Pick: Minnesota to win +155. Low confidence.
Baltimore @ Chicago (AL)
Tim Anderson, a favorite of these blurbs, had another strong weekend at the plate, employing an emphatic spike of the bat to celebrate his walk-off home run that ended a wild game Friday.
That home run, though, was only his third hardest-hit ball of the game, highlighting an impressive improvement for Anderson: Through nearly one month of play, he’s hitting balls in play an average of 2.6 mph harder than he did last year, and the result is that his XBA (expected batting average, given the amount of and quality of contact) has jumped from .227 to .321, an enormous improvement.
What’s responsible for this shift—approach, mechanics, forces invisible to the human eye, etc.—is unclear at this depth of analysis, but that increase demonstrates that even with the unsustainable .448 BABIP (J.D. Martinez led qualified hitters with a .375 BABIP last year, and Martinez hit a lot more home runs than Anderson will hit, to give you an idea of how unsustainable it is), Anderson’s improvement is no fluke.
Pick: Chicago (AL) to win -127. Low confidence.
St. Louis @ Washington
After a late collapse last year, an early collapse in 2017, and a close-but-no-cigar 2016, the Cardinals are back in the playoff hunt in a feat of rebuilding while remaining competitive.
No, the Cardinals don’t have one of baseball’s best farm systems, and even today they aren’t a particularly young team, but through free agency, Matt Carpenter’s renaissance, and some shrewd dealing, they’re well-set for the immediate future.
The Nationals find themselves in a similar situation, with few weapons waiting in the wings, but a competitive roster that should, for the most part, stay contiguous into next year, with young players improving to offset the regression of their older teammates.
Will it be enough for either to get a championship?
Signs point to no. Fangraphs has their combined championship probability under 10% for 2019. They’re probably two of the best four teams in the NL at the moment (behind only the Dodgers and possibly the Cubs, with the Phillies a party to the debate), but the Dodgers are robustly ahead of the field, and the strength of individual powers in the AL means even a World Series berth would likely come with underdog status.
Still, if the goal isn’t to win a championship, but is instead to compete for division titles, playoff berths, and possibly a World Series appearance, these franchises are in great shape. And as the Royals showed in 2015, sometimes being in the mix is enough to come out with an all-forgiving ring.
Pick: Nationals to win -139. Low confidence.
