Two MLB teams to back and two to fade
By Shawn Young
Just like they like the The Transformers, some baseball teams are more than meets the eye.
Teams won’t always regress to their expected record in the course of a season of course. That said, if you’re on the fence about making a play, there are different tools you can use to talk yourself in or out of placing the wager.
“X W-L” is something of a spooky Pythagorean, fancy Sabremetric deal, but it’s not sufficiently mysterious that it isn’t available on MLB.com’s standings page. The formula takes into account the runs for and runs against for each team and comes up with an adjusted win total.
The numbers below reflect play through Monday night’s games.
Better than the record reflects:
The Pittsburgh Pirates warm my heart by making this list. Their actual record is 43-56, but the formula says they should be 47-52. I’m a dog bettor, so that gets me singing “We Are Family”.
As might be expected, they lose a lot of one-run games. They’re 7-15 in one run contests. Let’s get our heads around that for a second. The Pirates are runline dogs often. If you blindly backed the Pirates +1.5 this year, you’d be 58-41. (You’d win the 43 games they actually won, plus 15 more.)
If your average price was -140 or better, that’s worthwhile. A slight word of caution: it’s a small sample size, but the Pirates were one of only five NL teams to post a winning Interleague record. Those days are gone.
The Toronto Blue Jays are another team that should be doing better than their 49-51 record suggests. The formula says they’re supposed to be 54-46. They lead the majors in one-run losses (18) and blew a 9-1 lead on Saturday for good measure.
This may be another team, like the Pirates, where we need to sit back, breathe deeply, and start betting.
The Jays have crashed since a spectacular April. The Halladay trade rumors are a total soap opera. The entire opening day rotation has hit the DL at least once. Fine.
Buy, buy, buy.
Bookies aren’t in business to take stands. You’re going to see attractive numbers on the Jays the rest of the way. If the rest of the game makes sense to you (the pitching matchup, the batting order and the bullpen status), go ahead and bet this team.
Worse than the record reflects:
The Houston Astros are a 50-49 team, but the X W-L stat says they should be 46-53. They’re basically a .500 team both at home and away, so that might suggest they’re especially worth going against when they get credit for a non-existent home field advantage.
This play-against strategy might be even stronger for the next week or so: Lance Berkman made the line jump a bit when he was in-and-out of the lineup for a week before going on the DL. Once he hit the DL last Thursday, the line burped for the weekend series of games. But by now, a lot of bettors have forgotten he’s a huge hole in the heart of the order. Don’t make the same mistake.
It actually pains me to report this, but the San Diego Padres might be even worse than their record of 38-62 suggests. X W-L says they should be 35-65, a .350 team. Yuck.
Here’s a rare animal: the baseball dog that needs to be avoided (OK, not that rare: Nats bettors receive Capitol Punishment). At 14-16, they’re almost .500 in one-run games, and they do play their fair share, so if you need to play them, the runline is probably your spot.
The counterpoint, though, is compelling: if you’re ever tempted to give 1.5 runs away, the plus price you need on the Padres on the reverse runline is massive.
Giving 1.5 runs, they’re 24-78, which means +325 over time is only a break-even proposition. (So if you can take 1.5 on the opposition, laying less than -300, that just might be an opportunity.)
It hurts me to say it, but sometimes the favorite is the right call.