Worst Team in MLB

Posted in Baseball - 2011/04/05 - 1 Comment

In his most recent post, Lou writes, “I’d…like to take the Astros for fewest wins in MLB this season if that’s available someplace.”  I made a half-assed attempt at seeing if any line like this exists, if it does I cannot find it.  So, let’s try to figure out what the line would be.

The Astros over/under this year for wins was 71.5.  We are only going to focus on teams with a projected win total of below 76, Baltimore and everyone above are excluded.  I know normally there would be a “Field” option, but I am going to ignore that for this.

  1. Arizona 72.5
  2. Houston 71.5
  3. Washington 71
  4. Cleveland 71
  5. Seattle 70
  6. Kansas City 69.5
  7. Pittsburgh 68

Seven teams in this group.  So if I were to look at this, my first thought would be, “Well there are 7 teams, so Houston has to be around 7:1.  Plus, they are better than most of the teams on the list, so to account for that, I’ll pump them up to 9:1.”  And that would probably be my offer to Lou.  But that aint’ the issue.  What we are trying to figure out is what would be the Vegas Line on this thing.  And now that I think about it, it seems borderline naive to think that Vegas would offer 9:1 odds on this when Houston is only projected to have 3.5 more wins than the worst team.  So we gotta come up with something better.  I think a good way to figure some odds on this are to compare these numbers with something we do have, odds to win divisions, combined with projected win totals.  The NL West…

  1. San Francisco – 88 – 1.4:1
  2. Colorado – 86 – 1.9:1
  3. Los Angeles – 84 – 3.4:1
  4. San Diego – 76 – 14:1
  5. Arizona – 72.5 – 23:1

As a starter this is OK.  San Fran is a little better than even money to win a division where they are 2 full games clear of Colorado.  But there are all kinds of problems doing things this way.  The most obvious is that this division doesn’t breakdown anywhere close to our fake division.  The NL West isn’t made up of half a dozen teams that are projected to finish within 5 games of each other, and that’s going to make things weird and skewed.  But let’s keep going and throw another division up for some more comparison and info.  AL West.

  1. Texas – 86 .5 – 1.2:1
  2. Oakland – 83.5 – 2.1:1
  3. Los Angeles – 83 – 2.5:1
  4. Seattle – 70 – 24:1

This example gives a pretty good demo of how Vegas works when the odds are tight like our worst team question.  Again, Texas slightly better than even money, a full 3 games clear of Oakland.  But this division kind of sucks because there are so few teams.  Some might suggest here that we go to the odds to win the pennants in both leagues since it involves more teams.  In doing so we see that…

  1. Boston – 95 – 2:1
  2. New York – 91.5 – 3:1
  3. Chicago – 85.5 – 7:1
  4. Texas – 86 – 7:1

This leads to some serious dead ends too since these odds are largely based on the divisional odds we’re struggling through, and that only adds more layers of headaches.  For example Tampa is listed with a higher win projection than Oakland, but Oakland is listed with better odds of winning the pennant.  But what this case does do is show that a 3.5 game projected win difference is only a difference btw 2:1 and 3:1 when there are a lot more than 2 or 3 competitive teams involved in figuring a winner of something.  Obviously, if these four teams were a division, these odds would not be the same in picking a winner, our AL West example tells us that.  So somewhere in between is what we are looking for.

The following then is where all this leads us in my opinion.  With some fudge math, taking everything into account that we’ve been doing…

  1. Arizona 6.25:1
  2. Houston 5:1
  3. Washington 5:1
  4. Cleveland 5:1
  5. Seattle 3.5:1
  6. Kansas City 3.5:1
  7. Pittsburgh 2.75:1

This would definitely be different if I had included “The Field,” and I have no idea how wrong or right this is.  But, I went from offering Lou 9:1 on Houston with the worst record to 5:1, so if nothing else, it’s right for me.

For schlitz and giggles I am going to write down here the number of wins for the worst team in the last few years, not sure why I am doing this, or if this will be enlightening…57, 59, 59, 66, 61, 56, 51, 43, 55.  So since the 2002 season the average wins by the worst team in baseball is about 56.  Doesn’t really tell me anything other than Vegas is going to be substantially wrong on at least one of these teams if this year follows suit, and if Vegas doesn’t know, it’s anybody’s ballgame!

One thought on “Worst Team in MLB”

  1. Update. Lou has attempted to take Houston at 5:1 through me but at this moment Houston is 0-4. I am holding out taking action on this until the Astros have at least one win, maybe two. I refuse to be the guy who took the Nets over last year at good odds when they started 0-5 only to go 0-19 or whatever. I would have given this action in a heartbeat before Opening Day.

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