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Baseball Betting Angles off a Win
Baseball differs from basketball and football in that it is a natural part of the regular season to play the same team multiple times in a row. Two teams will play each other on back to backs in the NBA on rare occasions but they rarely schedule them in the same city. It is usually a home game then a road game or vice versa. In football, it never happens.
Handicappers like us created a term called "revenge" because we identified the importance of analyzing how teams fared against their opponents earlier in the season. "Revenge" does not exactly work in baseball because the sport is so dependant on momentum. Teams off a win are more likely to win their following game plain and simple.
We wanted a leg up on the bookies and ask ourselves a question that certainly is not being factored into the spreads. "What is the correlation between winning a game and the likelihood that team wins its next game as it pertains to the series." Anything we find can almost certainly be used in our betting arsenal because the Vegas bookies have no incentive to adjust spreads accordingly based on the series game number, right?
We needed to get some background information before we started. Teams (overall) off a win are victorious in their following game 8707-8262 (51.3%) of the time. Keep in mind that we are going to disregard the odds of the game because the sample sizes are large enough such that we deem it irrelevant.
If their following game is:
- Game 1 of another series: 2821-2597 (52.1%)
- Game 2 of the same series: 2728-2641 (50.8% )
- Game 3 of the same series: 2563-2414 (51.4%)
- Game 4 of the same series: 468-486 (49.0%)
From our 4 test cases, we found 2 of them to be at or around the average but we found 2 that were intriguing.
First, we found that in the fourth game of a series, this team was actually more likely to lose. If that does not make sense to you, let me explain. If two teams are playing in the fourth game of a series then chances are they are division rivals and play with a high level of intensity. And if a team lost game 3, it is likely to be down 3-0 or 2-1 in the series and will look to get the final game in its pocket.
Second, we found that teams playing in the first game of a series were more likely to win. We have been harping about this a lot in our betting systems when we are betting in the first game of a series. Something even more intriguing is the fact that the 52.1% contains a large number of intersections. Meaning, two teams can each come into game 1 of a series off a win. For my purposes, the angle would be considered 1-1 because it is evaluating each of their performances separately. Now if we use exclusion to limit ourselves to teams coming into a series off a win versus teams off a loss, this is what we find.
A 1484-1260 (54.0%) record +80 units with only 1 losing season over the past 7 seasons.
The losing season back in 1999 was when the angle went for a combined -1.0 units. A losing season by the slimmest of margins! I still would not blindly bet it but combining this knowledge with other key baseball factors such as:
- Pitching
- A team's recent hitting performances
- A team's momentum coming into the game
- Whether the game is a rivalry or not
- Season progression
- Whether the team is in a playoff run
will really boost your profits this season. This system started the 2006 season with a 7-1, +6.5 units record.
Check back for more updates as we start adding in criteria into this system to make it pop and fatten our wallets even more.
ADDED 6/26/09
Based on a poor performance in the 2008 season and thus far in the 2009 season, we have had to make small modifications to the system.
- So we have excluded interleague games.
- And we are excluding betting against teams that are coming off a divisional rivalry series. Because as we had said earlier that teams off a divisional rivalry series play better than if they are coming off a meaningless series.
Contributors to this Article: Kris Lazaro is a struggling med student that spends his spare time analyzing odds and current angles. David C. Terr has a PhD in Mathematics, once working for Mathematics software giant Mathematica, now focuses on studying number theory. He can often be found giving lectures at various math conferences across the country.
