Betting Baseball

As I wrote previously, when looking for additional strategies for my punting portfolio the roulette wheel landed on Baseball.

Baseball 101
The game of baseball is played between two teams, each consisting of nine players.

The nine players are a pitcher, a catcher, first baseman, second baseman, shortstop, third baseman, left fielder, center fielder and right fielder.

A game of baseball consists of nine innings. One inning is divided into two halves; in the top half of the inning, one team plays in the field and the second team comes to bat, and in the bottom half, the teams reverse roles.

The team that is batting during a particular half-inning is trying to score runs.

The team with the higher number of runs at the end of the nine innings is the winner of the game.

During an inning, a player on the team in the field, called a pitcher, throws a baseball toward a player of the team at-bat, called the batter. The batter will try to hit the ball using a wooden stick (called a bat) in a location out of the reach of the players in the field. By hitting the ball, the batter has the opportunity to run around four bases that lie in the field.

If a player advances around all of the bases, he has scored a run. If a batter hits a ball that can be caught, or that can be thrown to first base before he runs to that base, then he is said to be out, and cannot score a run. A batter is also out if he fails to hit the baseball three times or if three good pitches (called strikes) have been thrown. The objective for the batting team during an inning is to score as many runs as possible before obtaining three outs

There are some fundamental truths to the game which make it attractive for sports betting

1. The primary objective for baseball teams and players is to win games.
2. The number of games that a team wins in a year can be predicted by the number of runs it scores and gives up. 
3. The role of a hitter on a team is to produce runs, while the pitcher’s role is to avoid letting the opposition score. 
4. Certain player statistics depend as much as on the player’s team-mate’s performance as it does on the player itself

Fortunately for us punters humans are more predictable/deterministic than our equine friends.

The game of baseball generates a huge amounts of statistics. Where there are numbers there are people who love to collect and study the numbers (no I am not a closet train spotter).

SABR, the Society For American Baseball Research, has sprung from the efforts of a band of dedicated fan-statisticians who delve into the statistical nooks and crannies of the game. They call their work Sabremetrics.

The wealth of statistics their work provides, finding the winner of the game should be a simple matter of matching team/individual statistics right?

While one could make a case for any one of a zillion stats to be factored into handicapping base games, there are some more important than others.

To identify these is easier said than done and our plight does not end there.

Handicapping baseball is no different from any sport. To be successful you need to identify “value”.

We all did it, me included. Hey, Roger Clemens is taking the hill against Glendon Rusch the biggest gas can in the league? -200? Lay it! Bam, Rusch has his best outing of the year and I’m down -2.00 units right out of the game. It doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out that -2.00 means that we are now playing from behind and have to win 2 games just to break even.

The point of the story is picking winners is easy. Beating the odds is not. More times than not, the -200 favorite will win a game like that. The problem is every time the much favoured pitcher doesn’t, your put in a hole.

Fortunately for a hard working and dedicated wannabe sport investor like me there are various sources of information available to help me develop my own baseball handicapping process. At the end of May I shall go live with the process.

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