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April 24, 2008 Baseball Picks
Tampa Bay Devil Rays (-120) over Toronto Blue Jays (1.0 Units) - The Blue Jays have some inherent advantages in that they are a divisional rival dog and they have a rested bullpen thanks to 8 full innings by Halladay.
But the bullpen issue is a bit nullified because of the fact that they are in the midst of a long road trip. Sure, if these Jays had a day off tomorrow or if they were coming back home, they'd think to throw out all their pitchers to ensure a victory. I'm not so sure they'd be willing to go to the bullpen early for the sake of a victory with so many more road games up.
As for the fact that we hate to go against divisional rival dogs, this is a boring game for the sportsbooks because they do not expect to get a lot of action on this game. So they throw out this dummy line of -120 on the favorite hoping that folks would bite. But not in a bad way. When sportsbooks want you to bite on a line, it would usually be because they see value the other way but increasing the amount of handle and interest in baseball this early in the season is a benefit to them. Long story short, this game was not given the attention it deserves.
To prove our point... consider this. Home divisional rival favorites up 2-0 looking for a sweep is a paltry -57 units the past 9 seasons including this year. Those teams are overvalued by an average of 11 points. This suggests that the team we are betting on is the wrong one, doesn't it? Well let's look at our premise that the sportsbooks did not put much attention on this game by seeing how these home teams did if they are a below 500 ballclub. Wam bam.. we are now +6.4 units essentially nullifying the earlier system.. and if we look to constrain our sample to American League teams where the DH has a heavy impact on the games, we get an angle that is [36-17, +12 units], a team that is undervalued by about 22 points. So we are justified to believe that these Devil Rays should be in the -140 range simply because they are at home and are seeking to get a sweep, something that is rare for a below 500 team.
