New Baseball Betting Strategies Factor Roster Dynamics

Week in Review

 

The Baseball Handicapper had a terrible week going 1-6 and losing 12.12 units for the week. The week culminated with Saturday’s 0-3 performance where none of our selections even scored. Our worst week last year was 2-9 for -12.14 units; very similar numbers. We are now -16.52 units after 2 weeks.  7 Best Bets were released on the week, below our anticipated 10-15 range.

 

Money Management

 

Bad streaks like this are part of a Handicapper’s reality and we overcame extended losing periods in each of the last 2 years to end those seasons in profits. The key of course is to stay in the game, and this means managing your money by using a conservative percentage of bankroll per unit. If you have not done so, we recommend reading our article on Money Management. Properly managing your bankroll is vital to long term success in this business.

 

Pitching, Pitching, Pitching

 

The lack of hitting and scoring has been receiving a lot of press and rightly so. The National League teams are batting only .248, a number not seen since 1989. Their 4.13 Runs per Game scoring pace is the lowest since the 3.88 runs per game scored in 1992. NL Batters are striking out 7.37 times per game, a number equal to last year, which was the highest in history!

 

American League hitters are batting only .250, a number not seen since 1972. The scoring average of 4.24 is the lowest since 1981 and the 6.72 strikeouts per game are the second highest in AL history. Only the 6.74 posted in 2009 exceeds this number.

 

So what is causing this? One thought is that teams are carrying older players on their rosters, due to long term contracts, fan appeal or any of a number of reasons. So we extended our baseball analysis to investigate this dynamic. It turns out that in the National League average batter age of 29.1 is the same it was in 2000, with some years since being both above and below this average. The American League does carry a slightly older average, probably due to the Designated Hitter. The 29.5 average ages of batter for the AL is in fact the highest since the WWII years of 1944-46. The AL Average for batters from years 1994-2010 is 29.   I will leave it up to the reader as to whether this additional ½ per year in age is statistically significant.

 

Can we take advantage of this trend?

 

Can we utilize this information in doing our Baseball Handicapping? Our Math Model and baseball betting strategy automatically factors in this trend in the computation of both the true odds and the anticipated total score. What about the Odds Maker? With less scoring one would expect more “unders” than “overs”. Unders are ahead, but at 244 to 240, the numbers are virtually even. Apparently the Odds Maker has also been adjusting the Over/Under odds to reflect this trend.

 

Wagering on Over/Unders

 

Next week we will cover the mechanics of betting on Baseball Totals, a wager that is more complicated than a straight bet on a Baseball Game and more complicated than betting Over/Unders in either Football or Basketball.

 

  

Wishing you a great week!

The Baseball Handicapper