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 –2.6% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 7,460 published picks, not including pending futures; and an average return on investment, per pick, of +2.2% 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 relying on Neil Paine’s NBA forecast as the basis for our playoff futures portfolio. We use our own Gelo model as the basis for our NHL playoff futures portfolio.
Active markets today: Major League Baseball moneylines and futures. With both the NBA and NHL futures, we’re still waiting at least one more game. Both series have gone our way so far, but we don’t have the leverage to hedge and we still prefer the value on the favorites, which is now very expensive to obtain.
Single-day MLB bets: Last year, we finished the season up about 8%, betting strictly moneylines. We’ve tried a similar approach this year. We’re 67–62 so far, down 4.96 units. It’s been a terrible performance, one in which every sign of progress has been met with a swift comedown. For example: After going 16–2 over the preceding seven days, we went 1–5 last night. (That’s still a 17–7 eight-day record, and we’ve halved our deficit, but you get the idea.)
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 place two medium-confidence bets most weekdays until sometime in September when the scenarios become more specific.
New York (AL) @ Kansas City
This is expensive, especially for Cody Poteet. But it’s only Game 2 of the series, the Yankees have a fresh bullpen, and the Yankees have been playing good baseball while the Royals have started exhibiting indications of regression. This is our best move of the day as we look to bounce back from last night (when we should have only gone 1–4—apologies for being an idiot and forgetting the Mets were coming back from London).
Pick: New York (AL) to win –155. Low confidence. (Poteet and Altavilla must start.)
NL East
We’ve reached the point where there’s positive value available somewhere on the Phillies, and without a lot of that in our portfolio, we’ll take it, even against the low-upside cost. Our current assortment of division bets isn’t great, and while we have a lot of outs, raising our baseline is more directly helpful. This accomplishes that.
Pick: Philadelphia to win –500. Medium confidence. x2
