March 11
Nothing doing yesterday in NHL and nothing again this evening either on a short schedule. Capitals are a lean and nothing more. Since we have a free day and I teased this earlier in the week, I’d like to briefly move onto baseball. The top play for this season and will be my 10 point confidence pool play is Tampa Over 79.5. Long time readers of this site are aware that odds tend to get over adjusted when teams lose key players as their replacements qualities are often only briefly considered. Such is the case for Tampa who were slightly unlucky last season overall.
Tampa also represents what is far and away the best longshot opportunity for futures and that’s for them to win the AL East at or around +750. If you have Tampa as a mid-to-high 80s win team, as I do, then this payout is way, way off and should be much closer to 2-3:1. Also consider that the AL in general and AL East specifically are very clustered with lots of similar win totals across the league. Consider this bit from Ben Lindbergh:
The AL is a prognosticator’s nightmare. As Phil Birnbaum and Neil Paine have noted, there’s an absolute limit to the accuracy of baseball projections. Even if we were omniscient when it came to team talent levels, we wouldn’t be able to predict luck. And luck has large effects: As Birnbaum wrote, “On average, nine teams per season will be lucky by six wins or more.” So what do we do with a division like the AL East, where the worst team is projected to finish only six games behind the best? Even if those projections were perfect, it wouldn’t be at all unusual for the worst team to beat the best one through better luck alone.
Tampa to win the AL and World Series is around 27 and 55 to 1 respectively, but the division and seasonal plays are where the action should be.
