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 5,030 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.
Two markets today.
Single-game MLB bets: On the season, we’re 47–33–1, we’re up 6.86 units, we’re up 8% (the average line on our winners has been –118). April was great, May was bad, June has been good so far.
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 117.87 units, or 11.3%.
Arizona @ Milwaukee
Corbin Burnes appears to be regaining his form, and the Brewers might be doing the same, sweeping the Pirates over the weekend to stay inches ahead of the surging Reds in the NL Central. The Brewers aren’t good on paper—we want to make that clear, nobody in either Central division is better than an 85-win team on paper—but the Diamondbacks have been overperforming, and the market’s perception on them has probably started to shift from undervaluing to overvaluing. We’ll take the Crew.
Pick: Milwaukee to win –112. Low confidence. (Kelly and Burnes must start.)
NL Central
We like the Brewers here as well, but this one’s more about the Reds.
The Reds are playing very well. The Reds have a lot of young talent suddenly blooming. The Reds still only have three players projected to put together more than one win of WAR over the rest of the season, using FanGraphs’s Depth Charts. The talent is just not as much there as it’s perceived to be, perceptions heightened by the fact Cincinnati is playing in the NL Central, where sitting two games above .500 puts you at the front of the playoff race. The Brewers not only lead, but they’re the better team on paper (seven 1+ WAR players over the rest of the year). We’ll ride them a little bit.
Pick: Milwaukee to win +110. Medium confidence.
ALCS
Something else surrounding the Reds? The Astros are probably overvalued by futures markets. They’re a good team, and what Cincy just did was impressive, but the Astros are not what they’ve been. More quietly than the Dodgers, they’re stepping back and reloading a bit, and the result—just as we’re seeing in the NL West, where the Padres, Diamondbacks, and Giants consistently pop up as good options for us—is that there’s value on everyone else in the division (except for the A’s, or the Rockies in the case of the NLW). Today, that extends for the first time to the Mariners in the pennant market.
Pick: Seattle to win +2800. Medium confidence.
