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 -3.5% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 2,788 published picks, not including pending futures, and an average return on investment, per pick, of 0.3% across 762 completed high and medium-confidence picks.
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 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.
We’re onto our seventh day of MLB futures. If you’re new to this, what we’re doing is investing 520 units over the course of the regular season (with 520 more units in reserve for hedging and the postseason) in an effort to get our all-time results back to a positive average return. We have our strongest history in MLB futures, hitting on a lot of Nationals picks in 2019 and plays across the board last year, with only a small loss in 2020. Currently, our focus is on breadth—we’re taking the highest-value plays each day on teams we haven’t yet bet on. At some point, possibly tomorrow (we keep thinking it’ll be tomorrow but it hasn’t been tomorrow yet), we’ll have to switch to going deeper on individual teams, but for now, we’re minimizing holes while still getting some value.
NL Central
Putting both of today’s bets on one team because the odds are shorter than even. May be doing the same tomorrow with a team across the standings, but that’ll depend on the market not moving too much, either with the team we’re looking at or someone else we aren’t in on.
Within the NL Central, only the Brewers and Cardinals are actively trying to make the playoffs this year. That’s a good place to be if you’re the Brewers. The Brewers are the thinner of the two, depth-wise, but what pieces they have are significantly stronger than those of the Cards. The question, then, is whether the Brewers can maintain their health, and it’s a question about which I hold some doubts.
On the flip side of that, though, the Brewers might not need to maintain their health from here until October 5th to win this division. Maintaining it until September 15th might be enough, or maintaining it with a few two-week exceptions in the middle of the year. There’s also cause for faith that the Milwaukee front office will make moves to help this team win. They might not be splashy, but moves will likely be made, possibly soon. One of the biggest keys to the Brewers’ near-historic success last year (they won one fewer game than their franchise record) was the May deal that brought Willy Adames to the National League, and the Brewers have already dealt for a backup catcher—Victor Caratini—in just the last ten days. A lurking thing that shapes these probabilities is how much a team is trying to win. With the division title probability breakdown currently 68.1%/25.3%/3.2%/2.9% between the Brewers/Cardinals/Cubs/Reds on FanGraphs, this does favor the Brewers, who probably actually have a little of that 6.1% currently assigned to the Cubs and Reds, since these probabilities don’t forecast the likelihood of short-term upgrades and long-term investments via trade. Even if the probability is just 68.1%, that’s valuable at this price. We’ll take it.
Pick: Milwaukee to win -180. Medium confidence.
Pick: Milwaukee to win -180. Medium confidence.
