The Houston Astros come in as favorites against the Atlanta Braves. I've seen a variety of numbers for the money line so I'm going to pick one (from The Athletic) and talk about that. The Astros are listed at -145 for the Series and the Braves are listed at +120.
-145 means bet $145 to win $100 and is equivalent to 20:29 in fractional odds (100/145). That's an implied win probability of about 59% (145/245).
+120 means bet $100 to win $120 and is equivalent to 6:5 in fractional odds (120/100). That's an implied win probability of about 45% (100/220).
I have a hard time believing that ANY team in the post-season has a nearly 60% chance to win! That's too high for my taste. I think Houston should be favored but not by that much. The Astros have too much hitting and their pitching is pretty even with Atlanta's. If you add in home field advantage I think that's enough to tip the Series. But the Braves have a bit of magic going on right now and sometimes that's all it takes for an upset. I don't have a dog in the fight. If one team has "SF Giants" on their jerseys then I'll give a shit, otherwise it's just a bunch of guys running around in different colors.
Note that the win probabilities add up to over 100% (59+45=104). That extra 4% accounts for the vigorish (the "vig" or house cut). Those guys make money either way--god bless American capitalism! (Anyone who bets on sporting contests is a fool.) I do believe that this unholy alliance between MLB and sports books is ultimately a bad thing. I say enjoy the baseball before Las Vegas corporate quants wind up running the whole show.
--M.C.
24 comments:
Although I consider myself a baseball fan, and watch every giants game that I can, and many others, if the Giants are not in the World Series, it is just another sporting event for me. If the giants are in the World Series, than it is the most important baseball being played ever. Perhaps when and if I watch some of the world series I will watch with an eye on who could be a free agent that the giants might be interested in. I suppose I am much more of a national league fan, and I still am upset about the 1993 Braves, and I like Dusty, but the Astros cheating scandal has placed them way down in my thoughts. Almost seems as if two N.L. teams are playing. If one thinks that there is close to a 50/50 chance who the winner will be then it pays to bet on the underdog. I definitely will not wager on the series.
Houston is pretty well sewed up if I remember correctly. Atlanta has Freddie Freeman, Jorge Soler, and Eddie Rosario. I think Ehire Adrianza is a free agent too!
Astros reliever Kendall Graveman is a free agent next year, and of course so are Justin Verlander and Zack Greinke.
I was wrong--Carlos Correa will be a free agent after the World Series.
There may be some players who are actually better than Bryant who are free agents, but not many offer the positional diversity that Bryant has, and the giants seem to covet.
From Tim Kawakami's interview with FZ (The Athletic):
“But I would be surprised if we didn’t wind up doing at least one multiyear deal for a starting pitcher. Certainly all of our guys who are free agents are going to be looking for multiyear deals based on the seasons they had. We have interest in bringing all of those guys back. … We’d like to create a little bit more longer-term stability, but there may be some guys seeking one-year contracts and seeking a chance to re-enter the market in another year that we really like and we think can be really successful starting pitchers for us next year.”
At his season-ending presser earlier this week, Zaidi seemed to put any potential Bryant negotiations on the backburner, just because of the probable nature of Bryant’s market and the Giants’ priority on starting pitching. Zaidi essentially reaffirmed that to me on Thursday.
“Kris did a real nice job for us,” Zaidi said of the Giants’ big trade-deadline acquisition. “He obviously got out of the gates hot, cooled off a little bit in September, and again, when you’re with a team for 50 or 60 games, it’s hard to project any certain level of performance, it’s just such a small sample. He was arguably our best position player in the NLDS, and I think you saw the type of impact he could have on a team in that series.
“We’re deep on the position-player side. We have a number of guys who are platoon guys, every-day guys, we have a lot of at-bats that are accounted for. And we’ve got guys like Thairo Estrada (and) Steven Duggar that we’d like to see get better opportunities. You’ve got a layer of prospects that are even closer to being big-league ready, guys like (Heliot) Ramos and Joey Bart. So we at least have some options on the position-player side. Where all those guys on the position-player side, not just Kris but Brandon Belt, Donovan Solano, these guys fit our team, we’d like to have them back, but we have some options on that side.”
unholy alliance between MLB and sports books
Only positive (to me - YMMV) is it will accelerate the robo umps, as gamblers will not put with random close ball/strike calls.
I bet on a sport one time. I was in Vegas with Jon and within an hour I won a $1000+ progressive jackpot on a video poker machine, so I had mad money. So we had a few lap dances at a place downtown. And I put $100 on the Giants to win straight up. The game turned out to be a dramatic come from behind win for the good guys. That's the full extent of my sports betting career.
I did not think of that point about robo-umps, but I think it plays to my larger point, the increasing influence of gambling on the game. Gamblers, as you say, will not tolerate the randomness of a floating strike zone. Fans don't like it, but have no stake in the outcome. Gamblers--by that I mean the big gambling houses--have a real "stake" in the outcome! Ideally they would make money on any outcome, which is why betting is such a fool's errand, but they like predictability and stability, too. Any big business is involved in forecasting, and forecasting only works if you have some dependable parameters and constraints in the system.
When it comes to gambling, I think people should do whatever they want, even if that means spending stupid money on stupid things. What I can't get behind is MLB encouraging betting on the games and then getting a cut from the sports books! That's a disaster waiting to happen.
I noticed last night in the broadcast an ad for a "Fox sports book" and a phone app that you could make prop bets at any time during the game. They even advertised a particular bet ("$10 says Rosario homers in this AB with a $45 payout")!! Like I said if idiots want to gamble they have all the freedom in the world to throw away their money, I just cannot abide by a sporting entity like MLB openly participating in that.
MLB is either astonishingly naive or absolutely convinced of the integrity of their contests, that is, they can't be corrupted by fans betting on them. Neither of those positions are believable to me.
Giants are hiring. Two spots, a seasonal analyst and full-time data engineer.
Brush up on your Spanish and Python!
When a gambling house for instance puts a line on a game, ie; a giants game, and they know that perhaps Angel Hernandez is the home plate ump. the odds change. They not only look at how good or how bad an umpire is, but what the tendencies are for teams when a particular ump is behind the plate, and perhaps even more so how a particular pitcher seems to do when a particular umpire is behind the plate. To hardcore gamblers who take it seriously, it is a science. There is no known parameter that is off limits. Of course the big legal gambling houses run their odds based on trying to get the bets aligned to 50/50 on the dollars so they get the house take, but professional gamblers look at everything including the umpiring crew, with particular emphasis on which umpire is calling balls and strikes.
I like to look at the money line because I think it encapsulates the most amount of information about the contest. The betting lines get skewed when one team is hugely popular, or particularly fashionable, but overall the numbers tend to be a good snapshot of all the knowledge that's out there. It is sort of like WAR for ballplayers. It's a quick summary of a lot of inputs.
Professionals love it when amateurs play on their turf. That's why I say gambling is for fools. I wouldn't step in the ring against a real boxer, why would I play money games with people who are experts at such things?
Word is the Padres are hiring Bob Melvin to manage. I never thought he'd leave Oakland but perhaps with that franchise's issues over a stadium he decided to get out before anything bad happens.
I'm a big Melvin fan and think this is a good move for San Diego. Their issue seems to be PoBO/GM AJ Preller. They have a talented club but the organization appears rudderless.
Seems to me that injuries to their pitching staff was key to their downfall. Despite that, they still played the Giants tough.
17-34 in August and September, 26-43 after the Break. The injuries hit them hard, to be sure, but something else was going on. They fired their pitching coach before the season ended, for example. I'm guessing the staff wasn't on the same page with the players, or maybe with each other, which seems worse. Preller said after firing Tingler that the new manager would have full hiring control but then he went and got a pitching coach! But he gets and "A" for nabbing Melvin.
That's "an" A!!
La Stella has Achilles tendon surgery.
That's a tricky one. They say "four months" of PT for recovery, but it can often take a year to be fully healthy.
Donovan Solano is a free agent, and is a righty hitter. So are Mauricio Dubon and Thairo Estrada. Jason Vosler is the only lefty hitter I can think of in the system. Well, they have a Rule V guy, Mitchell Tolman, who is a lefty middle infielder at AAA, but I've not heard any noise about him.
A lefty-hitting middle infielder will be on the FZ-Harris shopping list, if only for insurance, Spring competition, or early-season depth. Ideally La Stella will be able to play more like himself in 2022.
The Pads had one stretch where they lost around 17 of 21 and 3 of those wins came against the giants. It seemed they could get up to play the giants.
Yup. Giants were 11-8 vs. Padres. Compare that to Rockies (15-4) and D-Backs (17-2)!!
Giants lose one of their hitting coaches: Donnie Ecker. He's going to be a bench coach in Texas for manager Chris Woodward.
Braves get a big start from a struggling starter and some big homers and that's it for the Astros.
On to 2022!!
Happy for the 3 ex-Giants!
And, as painful as the Game was to watch, I'm happy that I got to see Fried pitch brilliantly in SF in late September, supported by Duvall, Smith, & the miracle 5-pitch Eddie Rosario cycle. That gave me a bit more of a connection (& respect for Fried), when I watched the Series.
The Giants only lost six games in September and that was one of them! They'd taken the first two from the Braves in that series and were .500 (3-3) against them for the year.
As I've stated before, the Giants should be paying me NOT to attend Games. They only lost 2 Home Games in October - I was at both of those, too.
Post a Comment