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 -4.8% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 3,610 published picks, not including pending futures, and an average return on investment, per pick, of 0.9% across 948 completed high and medium-confidence picks (low confidence picks, these days, are in experimental markets for us). Our ETA to get the overall number back profitable is currently November 5th, the date of a potential World Series Game 7.
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 (in both sports and politics) 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. FiveThirtyEight’s SPI is heavily used in making soccer picks. ESPN’s FPI is heavily used in making NFL picks.
Just MLB futures today. Still not sure when we’ll get back to our other futures portfolios, but hopefully tomorrow (“hopefully tomorrow” is an unfortunate slogan we’ve found ourselves adopting lately).
For unit context: We started the season with 1,040 units available for futures and hedges against those futures. Entering today, we’ve netted 12.74 units of profit, and we have 540.74 units in the bankroll, with 536 units pending.
World Series
Doubling up on this one today, which has some positive value. We’re content to wait and see with the Guardians and Yankees, and while there’s value on both the Pads and the Phillies, we’ll take the Padres today since they’re the Game 1 favorites. We have a lot of possible approaches over the next week, but one is to try to go back and forth with the Padres and Phillies, batting the balloon higher on both of them so we maximize the leverage against which we can hedge.
Pick: San Diego to win +325. Medium confidence.
Pick: San Diego to win +325. Medium confidence.
If you want a broader look, here’s where each scenario leaves us (these will wiggle a little with our outstanding ALDS future, but not by more than six units):
| Winner | Loser | P/L |
| Padres | Astros | 417.1 |
| Phillies | Astros | 400.1 |
| Padres | Guardians | 292.7 |
| Phillies | Guardians | 275.7 |
| Padres | Yankees | 219 |
| Phillies | Yankees | 202 |
| Astros | Padres | 119.6 |
| Astros | Phillies | 79.6 |
| Guardians | Padres | -246.3 |
| Yankees | Padres | -272 |
| Guardians | Phillies | -286.3 |
| Yankees | Phillies | -312 |
Our most likely path from here is going to be to bet on some combination of the Phillies and/or the Yankees/Guardians winner to win their LCS, getting our worst-case LCS outcome to positive value, after which point we can worry about the World Series scenarios. With the World Series scenarios, we’ll ideally either be able to get value on the Yankees or Guardians or push the Astros high enough to cross the 230-unit mark, which is roughly where we become all-time profitable again. We’ll look for the possibility to completely hedge into profitability, but I’m guessing it isn’t quite there yet, and if we can preserve more upside than just enough to cross the threshold, that’d be great as well, so even if the full hedge is possible, we may pass.
