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 –0.8% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 5,051 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.
Just futures today, with it being the All-Star Break and all. We will be back tomorrow with more of these, or at least: That’s the plan. We still want to take three extra weekdays off of them at some point, but there’s too much opportunity in the market right now to make those three days include tomorrow.
Ok, the context and then the bets.
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 108.58 units, or 10.4%.
ALCS
This is a mistake by one of the books we’re using to pull these odds. It’s such a mistake that they have the Orioles at shorter odds to win the World Series. We’re going to take advantage of it, though, especially with the Orioles a big liability for us in the AL East and World Series markets. This is some useful counterleverage to what we have, so we’re really lucking out here. To be honest? If it’s still there tomorrow, we might take it again and kick our corresponding futures (we’d like to put something on Toronto and Atlanta this week) further down the road.
Pick: Baltimore to win +3500. Medium confidence.
Pick: Baltimore to win +3500. Medium confidence.
