Editor’s Note: For more than two years now, Joe has been publishing picks here and back at All Things NIT, our former site. There have been moments of elation (the Nationals winning the 2019 World Series, the first two months of the 2019-20 college basketball season). There have been moments of frustration (the Dodgers’ 2020 NLCS comeback, the second two months of the 2019-20 college basketball season). Overall, the results have been positive, with an average return on investment, per pick, of 2% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 1,354 published picks, not including pending futures. And while 2% might not sound enormous, you can do a lot with it over time.
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. FanGraphs is heavily used in making MLB picks.
Game 1: Philadelphia @ New York (NL)
This is a strange combination of picks, and I would advise heavily against parlaying them (for reasons of them being rather contradictory towards each other). But there’s some value on each.
The market’s still figuring out seven-inning regular season games. We’re working with a small sample size, and even with nine-inning games, there are some oddities with extra innings, the prevalence of tie games, how managers manage when games are close, etc. If you want a complex, vague, possibly-wrong explanation, there’s value here because the market seems to be treating seven-inning games as seven-ninths of nine-inning games despite that potentially not being the case numerically, and the over/under odds are a little broken when they’re trying to find value between such low numbers. If you want a simple, vague, possibly-wrong explanation, Taijuan Walker is probably significantly better than Chase Anderson.
Whatever the case, taking both of these means you only need to hit one to profit on the pair. So there’s an implicit hedge here in that.
Pick: New York -1.5 (+155). Low confidence.
Pick: Under 6.5 (+105). Low confidence.
