Sports Betting Thread - Page 30

note to self, fade the clippers forever

a couple baseball season props for the lolz

Mauer vs Pence - who will have the most home runs
Hunter Pence (Hou) -½ home runs (-120) [pending]

Braun vs Teixeira - to have the most home runs
Ryan Braun (Mil) +4½ home runs (-120) [pending]

Youkilis vs Zimmerman - to have the most home runs
Ryan Zimmerman (Was) -1½ home runs (-110) [pending]

also picked up braves futures at different prices.

I dunno bout those bets Crayons.

The best metrics to predict homers are imo PX (Linear Weighted Power Index), FB%, and historical HR/FB%. A PX of 100 is set to league average and Pence has been headed in the wrong direction. His PX was 137 in 07, 127 in 08 and 114 last year. A steady 3 year decline in PX for a 26 year old with no sign of injury and consistent playing time is exceedingly rare and it casts a huge shadow of doubt over his ability to hit more HRs this year. Pence is also an extreme groundball hitter, 53% of his balls in play are ground balls and only 33% are fly balls. When you hit so few fly balls, it is really hard to hit many homers. His splits there also show a decline in skills, each year he has been hitting slightly more ground balls and few flyballs and line drives for the past 3 years. Pence is still relatively young and it is possible that he discovers a power stroke and makes some strides this year but all the signs point against that from happening.

Mauer on the other hand has always had below league average power but broke out last year for a PX score of 122. At 26, the same age as Pence, I would rather bet on his growth curve to continue rather than Pence's decline to reverse. Mauer was aided last year by an obscene 20% HR/FB ratio and that will not happen again this year. Mauer actually has an even lower FB% than Pence at 30% last year, but he has always had a good line drive % in the low to mid 20% which is a sign that he is driving the ball rather than pounding it into the ground.

I would say Mauer vs Pence for HR is about even money and that is only because Mauer is a catcher and has a higher risk for injury. At -120 for what is essentially a straight up bet, I would definitely pass.

I love Braun and I have him rated third on my draft board this year ahead of Utley and ARod. However, his PX scores for the past 3 years are 190/166/144 along with a corresponding drop in HRs - 43/37/32. Most worrisome is that last year was starkly different from the past two years in terms of his G/L/F (groundball/line drive/flyball) splits. He had 39/16/45 in 07 and 39/17/44 in 08, basically the same profile of a flyball hitter. But in 2009, his splits were 47/19/34, a 12 point increase in groundballs and an 11 point decrease in flyballs. He is hitting more line drives which bodes well for his overall value, but the drop in PX and flyball % last year and the fact that he was actually extremely fortunate in terms of random variance to even hit 32 homers. I believe that he is not a great bet to increase his power production this year.

Tex on the other hand has had one of the most reliable and consistent PX scores in baseball with a PX around 160 for the past six years. While 27 is the generally accepted magic age for hitters, research has shown that power peaks a little later around 30. Tex at 29 this year is entering that sweet spot with a terrific homepark for homers, an excellent lineup and ample protection and a remarkably consistent history of health and power. Off the top of my head, I'd say that +5 (-100) would be a reasonable line.

Zimmerman PX scores past 3 years 122-101-145. Youk's PX scores 112-166-162. Zimmerman has 57 DL days past 3 years, Youk has 15. Zimmerman has youth on his side but Youk is still only 31, an age where his power should not be decline just quite yet. Two years ago, Zimm was almost exactly at league average in terms of power and his PX spiked to 145 last year, but Youk has been at 160+, which is at an elite level for two years running. The surface stats of 29 and 27 homers in the past two years do not do justice to the immense underlying power skill that youk has consistently displayed for two whole years. I'd peg the fair line at PK (-100).

baseball is so whack plz stop guys

I was hoping you'd comment. I'm not laying a ton on these but here's my thinking.

Obviously Mauer is a phenomenal talent and and has few meaningful comps. He's a guy I rout for but I'm seeing a lot of people expecting him as you said to build on his power growth. I agree that his power should grow, and I don't doubt his new found power is real and I expect it to continue to trend up as he ages, but I still am always going to fade big spikes and although I expect to be wrong a decent amount, especially when it's a spike by a talent like Mauer at his young age, I don't mind fading what I feel are irrational expectations that his power will continue to grow at the same rate without variance.

This isn't really a statement about Pence as it is a fade of Mauer. I considered him a fairly low risk 20-25 HR guy which is all I really want to bet against for Mauer. Since he is also under 28 and arguably has potential for a breakout, it's butter. As you also noted, I think the injury risk with Mauer is higher and hopefully Minn will be a little more conservative with his PT with their long term investment in him. I found your comments about Pence regressing very interesting. I'll definitely be doing some reading up on PX as a result.

Additional fun facts are that he was just MVP, and inked a big contract, and is likely more well known than Pence. Mauer clearly has the makeup that makes him one of the least likely to get lazy with a new contract as seen by his hometown discount, but it's still a factor (even if only in terms of conservative PT discussed above) when compared vs the pre-arb Pence.

Braun/Tex most simply put is two things:
1) A Yankee bias fade
2) Mean-regression / short term variance fade. Braun has hit 34/37/32 in his last 3 so last year seemed like downside variance. Tex on the other hand was 33/30/33/39 so arguably had upside variance. I understand he had 43 and 38 the two years prior of course.

This analysis seems rather simple compared to your PX score analysis. I wonder how much year to year variance can be expected in those scores and how it came into play when a player had an adnormal year to one side or the other than came back in the line the next year. If you'd care to discuss one more player it would be David Wright based on his low power last year. I also am not clear on LD vs FB breakdown for the purposes of these splits. Without PU broken out of the FB number, I would consider increasing LD in lieu of FB a good thing, although possibly not for a pure HR prop like this with extreme power hitters.

Good points crayons. My main issue is with Pence and his declining PX and extreme groundball tendencies. I actually think that there is a greater chance that he hits less than 20 homers than there is of him exceeding 25. Fading Mauer and your reasoning behind it makes complete sense, it's just that I think Pence is the wrong guy to go up against.

Wright's PX past 3 years 140-147-110. The bigger issue for wright is that his contact rate, which had been at exactly 81% for 3 straight years dropped to 74% last year. So even though he hit .307, his xBA was actually .257. In 2008 his avg was slightly lower at .302 but his xBA was .307. I'm expecting his homers to rebound a bit but for his average to fall, something along the lines of .280 and 25 homers.

Problem with the Braun Tex bet is that the variance will actually hit Braun more than Tex. There is something called a random variance score which breaks down the core skills and grades how "lucky" or "unlucky" a player was on a scale of -5(extremely lucky and likely to regress) to +5(unlucky and likely to improve) and Braun was a -3 last year. When you see 34/37/32 homers from Braun, he was actually lucky in the season that he hit 32 homers given his PX and FB% while he was unlucky the season he hit 34. If his base skills remained the same, then yes, there should be mean regression, but the underlying fact is that Braun's power skills regressed big time last year.

I'm a Greek god of walks fanboy and hoping he sports the stache this year but this is another big market team fade. Zimmerman as you noted had a power surge last year (20-24-14-33), which is exactly what I faded with Mauer which makes this fairly reckless. Zimmerman's past few years have been arguably depressed due to not only the power growth, but also the injury plagued year, and a beneficial ballpark change. These, together with the big market fade were the very surface level things I looked at when degening my action here. Moving forward I don't perceive injury risks with either, as you said Zimmerman had the shoulder injury 2 years ago, but has clearly moved on from that and is still young and Youk has been a model of health despite being a little older. Will Carroll has both in the green. Youk validated his spike last year going 16-29-27 so it's probably not prudent to do a 3 year average here which is why projections like CHONE/Pecota have him around 23/24 vs 27/27 for Zimmerman.

How consistent is PX from year to year? Is a player last year's PX a better predictor for next year than his career PX or trailing 3 or 5 year PX for instance?

Meh maybe this does deserve it's own thread now. Although I don't have much more to add in terms of value in the prop bets so maybe I'll submit any further questions about PX via PM. Did you do (are you going to do) the big fantasy league in New York again this year?

I'm fine with the big market fade assuming all other factors are equal. But the better fade imo would be fade lucky surface stats such as HR, ERA, AVG that do not have the base skills to support it. For Mauer-Pence, it is mostly about me being very bearish on Pence. For Zimm-Youk, I'm bullish on Zimm, but VERY bullish on Youk. Youk has a high FB% AND LD%, his PX is elite, he has a fantastic batting eye, OPS scores of roughly 950 for the past two years and still he has yet to crack 30 homers. The public will greatly underestimate youk's power potential based on the 16-29-27 number that you quoted without realizing that the skill set is not much different from Texeira.

Ron Shandler had an excellent article that prefaced his new Mayberry Method. CHONE/PECOTA are two of the best projection systems but projection systems by definition are imperfect systems that aim for excessive and unrealistic accuracy. That is why I'm going to ignore the CHONE/PECOTA projections and focus on the underlying power skills to make a determination. I'm gonna cut and paste a snippet here since I think the concept has applications in handicapping as well. Here it is:

Tonight, the friendly weather forecaster on my local television station has told me that it is going to be partly cloudy tomorrow with a high of 78 degrees.

I suspect that the meteorologist's advanced modeling system spit out that fancy number -- 78. I often think, why not 77? Or 79? The truth is, if I were to walk outside right now, I'd feel no difference if it was 77, or 78, or 79.

In fact, it probably requires a good five degrees for me to feel any noticeable difference, and even then, it would be slight. 79 versus 74? 46 versus 41? 97 versus 92? More important, a five degree difference wouldn't likely make me change my behavior. If I'm not wearing a light jacket at 79, I'm not likely going to do so at 74.

The 10-day forecast on weather.com is an even more interesting exercise. Besides the fact that I don't believe they can accurately tell me that it is going to rain a week from Sunday, the list of daily high temperatures seem to be an exercise in excessive precision: 80, 82, 81, 82, 80, 77, 77, 77, 74, 76.

What does this tell me? The first half of the week is going to be warm. The second half of the week is going to be marginally cooler.

In fact, they could just say that the temp will be in the low 80's and I would be perfectly okay with that. High 70's, low 80's, high 80's, low 90's... that's all I need. They wouldn't even have to bother with mid-70's or mid-80's because that won't change what I am going to wear anyway.

What's more, that extra precision is not buying them anything. That same TV station ran an interesting exercise last year. They put some money into a pot for each day that their high temperature forecast was off by three degrees or more. At the end of each month, they'd have a drawing and some lucky viewer would get the cash. They've since abandoned the contest due to budgetary concerns.

What do we gain from the extra precision? We delude ourselves into believing we are gaining accuracy when in fact we are gaining an increased probability of being wrong. We're just not good enough to predict the temperature to the exact degree on a daily basis. We need to come to terms with that. And most important... there's no great need to be so perfect.

Take Miguel Cabrera, for instance.

Coming into the 2009 season, we had projected that he'd hit 39 home runs this year. That's his M.O. -- he hits home runs in the 30's. The fact that "39" would have been a career high for him is almost irrelevant. Last year's 37 was his previous career high and the difference between that and 39 would have been, as we say, "two errant gusts of wind."

Currently, Cabrera has 28 home runs and is now projected to finish with 33. The difference between 33 and 39 is a little bit more noticeable but does not substantively change who Cabrera is. Nor would it have changed the way fantasy leaguers approached him at their 2009 drafts. It won't likely change draft behavior in 2010 either.

What's more, we already know that there will be a 30% error bar around whatever number we attach to his projected home run output. For a 30ish home run hitter, that could be a variance of ten home runs! Suddenly, my 39 HR projection doesn't look so bad.

So I have to ask, why do we need to attach a "39" to his projected home run output? Like the weather, we can't predict with that level of precision and the results won't change our behavior anyway.

Perhaps we should just project that Cabrera will hit HRs "in the 30s." It's a wide enough range that not only covers our error bar but, oddly, also increases our accuracy. If we design a forecasting model for our drafts that can accommodate the imprecision of performance with the volatility of playing time (as discussed in my previous two columns), we might actually have something useful.

You're preaching to the choir with respect to results vs underlying skill. I openly accept PX as a better predictor of HR instead or HR itself but my intentions were not to cap HR outputs, only mean reversion to 3 year numbers (or otherwise fade irrational exuberance). So if 3 yr PX numbers are better than ly PX for predicting ty PX (and thereby HR) I'm still good.

For the most part I was looking to fade actual homer run outputs from last year under the premise that although spikes may be indicators of a change in underlying skills, from a bayesian perspective, even if there is enough evidence to note a significant increase in the underlying skill's true mean, that doesn't necessarily indicate that the true mean is all of a sudden equal to that latest result. Mauer certainly is a good bet to beat his 07-08 numbers but I'm not ready to say that besting his 28 of last year is an even money bet.

In terms of Mauer, I have no doubt that his PX increase is a significant indicator of an increase in underlying power skill, but that in no way means that his new mean is centered about ly's output of 122, simply that we can be fairly sure it has improved from 2008 to 2009 (see below for my question as to what the new expectation for his 2010 should be).

It appears that my rather casual exercise of basically betting on mean reversion (or against overreaction to ly's numbers) was actually poorly executed with my chosen props. Per your PX analysis, it seems that these 1 year deviations from the trailing HR averages corresponded with significant deviations in the underlying peripherals as opposed to simple variation. Ideally I would have liked to fade variance in HR when PX stayed constant. The real key is figuring out how quickly PX converges to the true mean I suppose.

If the PXly(last year) number is the best predictor of PXty(this years) and thereby HRty then I've done a shitty job of executing my desired intention with these bets. Worse yet, if the best predictor is based on the PXdelta (year over year change in PX (PX2009-PX2008)), I've just shat the bed basically.

I really need to find out more about PX including its variability/persistence. I don't doubt that predicted PX is what we should be focused on here as opposed to predictedHR, but I'm not sold that Pence's 137-127-117 is indicative of a decline in talent vs normal variation that I can still profit off of fading. If for instance 3 year PX is a better predictor moving forward then once again I'm getting value on a below average year ly even on the PX level. It's not as if he's at an age where a decline in PX is to be expected. If however ly PX is a better predictor than 3 year then clearly, I've made a mistake. You noted Pence's "steady decline" which makes me concerned that deltaPX could even be the most important stat which as already stated, makes Pence vs Mauer look really bad.

If you were to set an O/U on Pence's PX in 2010 what would it be? 117 (last year), 127 (3 year avg), 107 (continued decline 117-10 or PX09+PXdelta08-09)?

What would you predict Mauer's 2010 PX to be? 122 (ly), 3 yr avg, 122+(ly plus PXdelta08-09)?

I default to your answer since I don't know the stat well but I would have blindly assumed some 3 yr weighted avg or a regressed trend line possibly then adjusted for the normal age curve.

For fun what is your prediction for Wright's PX2010?

Khan, I stand corrected, fade the bulls forever, sigh.


Going to Nets game today so beting on Suns obvi. Go.

lol, its not like i took the bulls man, i had the suns before i read your post so no worries :D I mean bulls are alright and all but all they have is rose while the suns have nash amare frye richardson

Today's plays:

Mavs -2.5 vs Memphis
Heat -6.5 vs Pistons
Suns -7 vs Nets (going to game LOL)



GO.

sick i wish i was going to a suns game

On March 30 2010 22:02 RaiNKhAN wrote: note to self, fade the clippers forever

lol, now watch, they'll probably cover at Toronto.

Lakers look kind of tempting, tho, despite their recent spotty play.

3-3 today. ayooooo. gogogogogo