March is one of the best months of the year for a sports fan – NCAA basketball conference tournaments and March Madness, NBA and NHL playoff pushes, and the glorious return of baseball with Spring Training. As a Cubs fan, no one is more excited than I am for the season to start and watch the boys in blue defend their title. With Opening Day just around the corner on April 2, it’s time to turn more attention to baseball and project MLB win totals!
I started betting and handicapping baseball last summer and did very well (won 42 units), but am going all in on this season. I’ve been hard at work the last month developing a new model, researching trends and systems, and studying sabermetrics. If you’re reading this Theo, I’d move back to Chicago for you.
Over the next week, I’ll be publishing my predictions for each division and MLB win totals for each team. For those that don’t know, you can bet how many games each team will win during the season over or under a set number (known as win totals at your local/online sportsbook). As an example, here are the current odds for the NL Central:
| Team | Win Total | Odds (Over/Under) |
|---|---|---|
| Cubs | 96.5 | -115 / -115 |
| Cardinals | 83.5 | -135 / +101 |
| Pirates | 83 | -105 / -125 |
| Brewers | 70.5 | -102 / -130 |
| Reds | 70.5 | -110 / -120 |
If you think the Cubs are going to win more than 96 ½ games this season, you would bet $115 on the over to win $100 (you don’t have to bet $115, that’s just the risk-to-win ratio). Likewise, if you thought the Cardinals would win more than 83 ½ games (LOL), you would have to bet $135 to win $100. But if you thought they would win less than 83 ½ games, you would bet $100 to win $101.
Sportsbooks typically adjust the odds rather than the win total number as bets come in to make it easier to track their liability and avoid being “middled.” For example, say I first bet the Cardinals under 83 ½, but then a lot more bets came in on the under so the sportsbook adjusted it to 82 ½. I could then bet again but on Cardinals over 82 ½. If the Cardinals win exactly 83 games, I win both bets and thus “middled” my bets. This strategy is much more common for betting point spreads, but it is easier for sportsbooks to avoid with win totals.
I’ll be using my new model to project MLB win totals for each team, which I will also be using to make picks during the whole season. The basis of my model is loosely based on the one used by Joe Peta in his book Trading Bases, which I highly recommend for any baseball fan whether you bet the sport or not. Peta used his background in being a Wall Street trader to identify edges using analytics during the daily grind of the MLB season. His model revolved around the use of sabermetrics to project a team’s performance for the season and each game, and mine does the same but in a slightly different way. The book isn’t necessarily revolutionary for MLB bettors and oddsmakers, but it offers great insight on how to use analytics to identify edges throughout the season.
I’ll write more about my model in a future post, but I wanted to let you all know what is on the horizon here at Fast Break Bets! I’ll be releasing my projections by division throughout the week starting with the AL West later today. After that, the order will be: AL Central, AL East, NL East, NL Central, and finally the NL West. I’ll be posting these on Twitter and sending it out to email subscribers, so be sure to follow me here and subscribe to the blog if you haven’t already!
Go Cubs Go!!!