I’ve been trying to come up with something baseball related that we can play with during the summer. It’s too big a sport to tackle daily in this project…trying to monitor how sharps are betting every game in a 162-game season for 30 teams isn’t manageable for one old guy and a keyboard. Couldn’t do box score recaps seven days a week for six months either. Doing the playoffs and World Series was fun last October. Planning to do THAT again in 2024.
Could I find something fun to follow, manageable to write up, and HELPFUL to all of us who want to monitor baseball with an eye on potential betting edges? That’s the challenge. I pinned down my focus to the following…
*DEFENSE! Or, better phrased, “run prevention.” I think we learned the MOST during our Big 12 basketball project by seeing how well top defenses sustained themselves through time…and how soft defenses played even worse when they got tired, injured, disinterested, or otherwise even hindered more than their lacking skill sets suggested. The market was missing THAT kind of thing. We did some similar things during football too…though it wasn’t a point of emphasis in the same way. I think the “Super League” stuff was probably most helpful in the NFL.
Anyway, most media coverage of baseball celebrates offense, particularly fantasy-based coverage. I’ll try to focus somehow on run prevention to see where that leads.
*IGNORE STARTING PITCHERS! I’m not saying starters aren’t important. They’re obviously VERY important. But, information on those guys is readily available and easy for you to find. I’m not helping anything by becoming the 78th different guy writing up something about starting pitchers. You know where to find xFIP, K and BB rates, and the (much more complicated) like if you care. And, obviously, starting pitcher data is already a big part of market prices. I’m unlikely to find any surprises by studying starters.
*IGNORE CLOSERS! Same as above. Important, but already well studied. If you’re following the game, you know which closers slam the door shut in the ninth inning almost every time out. And, you know which teams are blowing leads in the ninth in a way that infuriates sports betting media pundits and convinces them to try to pick against 5-inning lines because they hate losing ninth inning leads. I’m not helping anything by confirming the stuff you already know about closers.
That led me to “mid-game” ideas. I finally settled on something that will either be one of my greatest ideas ever (ha!), or something really dumb that turns out to be a waste of time. And, we probably won’t know until July.
At the team level: RUNS ALLOWED IN INNINGS 4-8 ONLY
That excludes the first three innings, which is when the starters (that you already know well) are taking their first trip through the batting order. That excludes the ninth inning (and extras), so we’re taking closer impact out of the mix.
Because focusing on defenses worked so well for us in other sports, we want to discover WHICH TEAMS CAN PREVENT RUNS FROM BEING SCORED IN INNINGS 4-8 because their starters are also good the second time through the order…and/or because middle relief guys are getting the job done. And, probably more importantly, we want to discover WHICH TEAMS CAN’T DO THAT because their starters are more vulnerable the second time through…because the bullpen isn’t very good…and/or because the franchise doesn’t have the necessary resources to plug holes in its roster.
If there’s a blind spot for most bettors in this sport…that’s the blind spot! You look at the starting pitchers and base opinions (or bets) on how good or bad those guys are. You make adjustments depending on the closers (deciding it’s okay to lay chalk if you have a great closer, backing off if you don’t). But, you don’t really know much about what’s happening in innings 4-5-6-7-8 other than hoping your best hitter knocks a homer somewhere in there.
So, that’s the project. RUN PREVENTION, BY TEAM, IN INNINGS 4-8.
I’ll come up with a better name for that if it feels like it’s working. Probably something silly so skeptics don’t take it seriously. Then we can have fun while hopefully finding helpful information.
We’re about 11-12 games into the new season for each team. There are some fairly dramatic differences to this point. They certainly help explain what’s happening so far. May not have much predictive value going forward because this sport is so full of randomness. We may be looking at a mix of pitching luck, scheduling luck, and weather luck rather than true skill sets. I do think there’s some skill set signal within the noise.