Dissecting the Baseball Travel Angle - First Home/Road Leg

(July 31, 2006)

We all understand how travel affects a team in basketball. The sportsbooks will give a team an extra point if they are rested. Similarly, they will dock off a point if a team has no rest.

But very few people before us have quantified the affects of travel on baseball.

First, we start out by identifying the different types of travel in baseball and see how they have done W/L %, Units Won, and Expected Value (E[x]) when betting 100 on the team.

The most important thing we look at E[x] as it teaches you more about the return on your investment when you bet the team.

So as you can see, the toughest thing in baseball is to come back home from a road series. Reason: Players can be away from their families for as much as 2 weeks and we can guarantee that they will be more worried about seeing their families instead of playing the next game.

But it would be ludicrous to think that a team would let down like that if they played a division rival or something, right?

So let's analyze how teams in the (Road->Home) fared in the following Game Types.

As most simple systems go, it is a winner in Interleague games. And is why our Interleague picks are usually very good. But we were wrong in our assumption that they would be less likely to let down in a division rivalry game. The contrary is true. The division rival is prime for the attack like a tiger preying on a zebra. There is no let-up. As a result, the home team is almost 2% less likely to win in this situation.

Another thing we often say when making picks is that travelling is not going to help a team if it is struggling offensively. So let's look at the results of the previous two games. W = win, L = loss.

What we see is that the result of two games prior has more of a bearing on the result of this game. More importantly, we see that losses in prior games generally mean the team is going to fall fat on their face. The data above has pretty large samples such that it is worth it to narrow down our "go against" propositions to only the third and fourth row.

Another noteworthy thing to check out to identify struggling teams is points scored in their previous game.

Although the expected values may not appear to be consistent, with respect to the rest of baseball, it is very consistent. Teams scoring less than 3 runs do pretty bad. And team in the 7-9 range do bad because they did not score enough runs to be considered "on a roll" but they scored just enough points to have a let down in their next game. In any case, we must exclude teams scoring double digit runs. And keep the rest of the rows.

Going against this team has had winning seasons in all but one of the past 7 seasons. We have only done go-against angles. Sprinkle in a few simple trends and angles going for the other team and you will simply be loaded with cash.