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 -5% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 3,388 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 (low confidence picks, these days, are in experimental markets for us). Our ETA for having 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.
Just MLB futures today. For context: We started the season with 520 units in our MLB portfolio, with another 520 in reserve in case we need them to hedge down the line.
NL Central
There’s positive value on St. Louis today, even narrowly, and with them our only significant liability in the division markets, we’ll take advantage of the opportunity to chip away. Bit by bit.
Pick: St. Louis to win -180. Medium confidence.
World Series
The Rays are scary because their analytics tend to be so far ahead of the rest of the league that it’s hard to know what the sum of their parts is, at least relatively to how confident we can be in our assessments of other teams. These are good odds to get them at, and for the sake of our portfolio, they let us not really worry about Tampa Bay for a while.
Pick: Tampa Bay to win +5500. Medium confidence.
