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 –2.0% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 7,651 published picks, not including pending futures; and an average return on investment, per pick, of +2.6% across 2,293 completed high and medium-confidence picks. The low confidence picks are the problem. Most of our picks are in the low confidence category.
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 from 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. We rely heavily on FanGraphs for all our MLB action. We rely heavily on Nate Silver’s presidential election model for our election futures.
Active markets today: Single-game MLB bets.
Single-day MLB bets: Last year, we finished the season up about 8%, betting strictly moneylines. We’re 120–106–3 so far this year, down 10.71 units. We’re trying three new approaches, something we started on Thursday. So far, that effort is 6–3, up 1.96 units. That is a very small sample.
Philadelphia @ Arizona
The first of our three new approaches is the Heat Index. If you haven’t been around the last few days, the idea here is to look for the biggest gap in recent performance between a pair of teams playing today. Somewhat shockingly, the Phillies have played badly enough since the All-Star Break that this game exceeds even Padres/Marlins by our little pet metric.
It’s a dicey one. Merrill Kelly makes his return from the IL, which comes with uncertainty, and we’re rarely comfortable betting on teams to finish sweeps. (We had to ditch our prior Sunday approach of only betting Saturday losers in order to make room for these tests.) We are, though, beholden to our methods, at least until we’ve tested them out enough to figure out if we have something here. So, the Diamondbacks it is.
Pick: Arizona to win +110. Low confidence. (Sánchez and Kelly must start.)
Cincinnati @ Milwaukee
The second new approach is to bet the smallest favorite on the board. Today, that’s the Reds.
DL Hall’s had a weird career. He was a very good prospect in Baltimore. On FanGraphs’s 2022 preseason list, he found himself listed between Grayson Rodriguez and Colton Cowser. He drew comparisons to Josh Hader and Blake Snell. A very good prospect!
Upon debuting, Hall immediately moved to the bullpen, and to be honest, I’m not sure the reason for that. His eventual role was a question throughout his time in the minors, so it may be that the Orioles simply preferred him in relief. The choice may also have had to do with lightening his workload (he’d sat out the end of 2021 with a stress reaction in his elbow), or it may have been a function of Baltimorean contentment with its rotation at the time. Whatever the cause, he returned to starting this April when the Brewers acquired him in the Corbin Burnes trade. It didn’t go very well. Then, he sprained his knee, setting off a long, stop-and-start rehab process which culminates in his return—as a starter—today.
It is very hard to project a pitcher like Hall in a game like today’s. The market leans ever so slightly towards the Reds stopping Milwaukee’s win streak. We’ll trust it, again because we’ve committed to doing that as we see if these concepts hold water.
Pick: Cincinnati to win –106. Low confidence. (Lodolo and Hall must start.)
Texas @ New York (AL)
The third new approach is kind of an old approach. It’s our most-of-2023 and early-2024 decision-making process but limited only to identifying valuable underdogs. Today’s best by that token is the Rangers, who flash positive EV using FanGraphs’s win probabilities, have the same quality of bullpen theoretically unavailable as their hosts, and feature a starting pitcher in Andrew Heaney who’s outperforming his projections while his opponent, Marcus Stroman, has underperformed his.
Again, we’re uncomfortable with this. We’re uncomfortable with all three today. The Yankees are much hotter than the Rangers, so this somewhat contradicts the theory behind our Heat Index approach. The Yankees also lost Game 2 yesterday, and we have a sliver of evidence to suggest that could lead to them being undervalued today. Again, though, we’re riding with these approaches until we can gather enough data to get a decent pulse on their viability. So far, our underdogs are 1–2, down 0.95 units.
Pick: Texas to win +129. Low confidence. (Heaney and Stroman must start.)
