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% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 7,296 published picks, not including pending futures; and an average return on investment, per pick, of +2% across 2,268 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’re currently relying on Neil Paine’s NBA forecast as the basis for our playoff futures portfolio, but that’s subject to change.
Active markets today: Major League Baseball, both moneylines and futures, and the first steps in our NBA playoff futures portfolio.
Single-day MLB bets: Last year, we finished the season up about 8%, betting strictly moneylines. We’re trying the same approach this year. We’re 12–14 so far, down 2.57 units. It’s been a bad start, but we’ve been hotter lately, going 7–4 over the last four days for a 3.61-unit gain.
MLB futures: We have a great history with these, though the last two years we’ve only made small profits. In both 2019 and 2021, I believe we recorded better than a 50% ROI. In 2020, we lost about 25% of our portfolio. We began this season with 750 units in our 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. We plan to place two medium-confidence bets most weekdays.
NBA futures: We’ve only done these once before, but they went well. I believe we made a 7% return on our total portfolio last year. We’re doing a 100-unit portfolio for this, and we’re starting by placing just one per day.
Colorado @ Philadelphia
We’re laying up here. There aren’t any MLB plays we really like today on the value side, so we’re looking for a team that’s very likely to win and doesn’t come at all that poor of value to do so. The Phillies didn’t spend much bullpen tonight, have the healthier hitters, and have the better starter, one who’s been overperforming his projections while the Rockies’ guy, Austin Gomber, has been underperforming his own. Add in that the Phillies won yesterday and our 2022 test indicated Monday winners are often undervalued on Tuesday, and we like the Phils here.
Pick: Philadelphia to win –238. Low confidence. (Gomber and Suárez must start.)
NL West
We love the value on the Padres here. In terms of raw roster strength (using FanGraphs Depth Charts), San Diego’s only nine wins worse on paper than the Dodgers over a full season of baseball. An 83-win roster against a 92-win roster. We’re no longer concerned about Shohei Ohtani getting suspended, but there are big questions around every Dodgers starting pitcher, many of whom are unproven, three of whom are hurt, one of whom is aging, one of whom has had significant injury issues throughout his career, and the best of whom is in his first season stateside. Enough can go wrong for the Dodgers that we like having something on each of the Diamondbacks, Giants, and Padres. We already had something on the first two of those. This checks the third off our list.
Pick: San Diego to win +1600. Medium confidence.
NL Central
We don’t love the value here, but it’s positive, and we have nothing yet on the Cardinals, and we follow our own rules. That’s how this works. We aren’t concerned with St. Louis being in last place. They’re only three games back, and they’re only a game below .500. The way the NL Central is set up this year, teams who enter July with a winning record will be in the mix. We’re glad to at least have something on these guys to go with our Pirates investments.
Pick: St. Louis to win +350. Medium confidence.
Play-In Tournament
We used FiveThirtyEight’s NBA model as the centerpiece of our NBA futures approach last year. It worked well. That model is not currently publicly available, though we have some hopes Nate Silver will bring it back to paying Substack subscribers once the playoff field is set on Saturday morning. We’ll see. He brought back his NCAA Tournament projections and that seemed to go well for his subscriber numbers. His NBA model is pretty intense, though. It might be too big a workload.
In the at least temporary absence of Silver’s model, we’re using that of Neil Paine, a former FiveThirtyEight guy himself. Paine’s doesn’t center itself around the players, like Silver’s did. Instead, it’s a schedule-adjusted rating system with a heavy weighting of recent playoff performance, tempered with betting odds. (You can’t use betting odds as your probabilities for betting, because everything will project as slightly negative-value, but tempering a model with them just pulls everything into a window somewhat in-line with how the market sees it. What would be a +120% eROI turns into a +30% eROI, or something like that.)
Knowing about the limitations of this system, we aren’t taking the bait today on the Pelicans or the Timberwolves, the two highest-value teams to ride based on Paine’s probabilities. We might take those soon, but for right now, we’re skeptical, based on the Pelicans’ lack of playoff experience and our own desire to dig more into the Suns—the Timberwolves’ first round opponent—to see why Paine’s model might be so low on them.
Instead, we’re taking this prop bet. We’re betting on at least one of the Warriors, Kings, Bulls, and Hawks to win on Thursday or Friday and make the official playoff field. Paine’s probabilities assign this a 30% eROI, and they’re not too far off the market probabilities when it comes to individual teams making or missing the playoffs. This makes us think the prop is mispriced and that we’ll even have a hedging angle available come Thursday if we want it, one where the odds of a parlay combining the losers of the 7/8-games will be longer than +100 themselves.
This makes us fans of the Warriors and Lakers tonight.
Pick: 9 or 10-seed to advance to playoffs: Yes +100. Low confidence.
