Evening all.

As promised, I thought I would pop up a post about looking for value on the baseball coupon.

One of the key factors to assess, which makes betting on baseball quite different to betting on football, is each teams starting pitcher.

In the modern game, all 30 major league teams use a “five man rotation”, whereby they use five different starting pitchers on a 5 game/day cycle.

There are 162 games in a baseball season and, barring injury, each starting pitcher will pitch circa 32-35 games.

The starting pitcher has a huge impact on a baseball teams chances of winning – much more than any individual player could ever account for in an invasion game such as football.

A baseball game lasts nine innings, with each side batting nine times.  An inning doesn’t have a defined length – it simply ends once three batters have been retired.

It may only take five minutes and as few as three pitches.  Equally, it may take over half an hour and involve five plus pitchers throwing 50+ pitches if they are giving up a lot of runs and struggling to get people out.

Your starting pitcher is expected to pitch at least six of the games innings – assuming he doesn’t get knocked around too badly and isn’t removed from the game.

The elite top line starting pitchers will be looking to pitch seven or eight innings, or on particularly good days throw a “complete game”, although these are relatively rare – maybe a handful a season for great, durable pitchers.

Once a pitcher begins to tire (normally after 90 – 110 pitches) they are normally removed from the game by their manager (this is on of the manager’s judgement calls, not the pitcher himself) and substituted for one of the team’s “relief pitchers” from “the bullpen“.

A team normally has 7-9 relief pitchers on their roster.  Relief pitchers are used for a much shorter period than a starting pitcher (from as little as one batter and up to two innings apart from in exceptional circumstances) but will pitch much more frequently – as regularly as every other day for the most durable.

In general relief pitchers are less effective than starting pitchers – hence why they are used for shorter periods!  However, when not stretched out over too many innings, many are very effective.

The most effective relief pitcher on a team is normally used as “a closer” who is brought into games in either the eighth of ninth inning when the game is on the line.  They normally throw very hard fastballs and nasty breaking pitches to “close out” games and secure wins for their teams under pressure.

Being a closer takes a specific mentality.  It is a little bit like taking penalties in football – but much more stressful.  As such, most closer’s are lunatics.

The team I support probably has the biggest lunatic of all current closers.  If you want a laugh check out this site or the video below:

 

 

Stark.  Raving.  Bonkers.  But absolutely brilliant at the same time.

 

Back to the serious stuff

So, where on earth would you start to assess a pitcher?

Well, as I alluded to in my last post, the primary performance metric for a pitcher is their ERA.  This tells us, on average how many runs they would allow per 9 innings.  The lower a pitchers ERA, the fewer runs he allows and the greater his teams chances of winning his starts would be.  Simples.

Well, yes…  a bit too simples.

Pretty sure that ERA is a pretty big factor in the bookies pricing model, and therefore unlikely to realise too much value.

However, there is a great amount of “additional” analysis carried out on baseball statistics – a phenomenon often referred to as “Sabermetics”.

There are so many different way to look at a pitchers performance it is almost unbelievable.

How many hits does the pictcher give up?  How many batters does he generally walk? Does he have the stuff to strike guys out when he needs to?

Other factors that could and should be considered would be how he is currently performing versus career averages, and whether or not his current stats are a true reflection of his performance levels.  Has he been “lucky” or “unlucky” in the current campaign?

I could write you a 10,000 word piece on this assessing the current major league starters.  But the game starts in an hour, so we need to get a wriggle on.

The guys are Fan Graphs (the world leading Sabermetrics site) create a couple of performance metrics that does a lot of these things for us – called FIP and xFIP.

Have a quick read if you are uber keen.

 

The numbers

So, in basic terms, people whose ERA is way out of kilter with their FIP or xFIp rating are likely to see their performance regress towards their true talent levels.

Check out the table below which pulls the league’s current “out of whack” pitchers:

 

MLB starters – xFIP/ERA outliers

Name	Team	G	W	L	ERA	IP	SO	K/9	BB/9	HR/9	BABIP	FIP	xFIP	xFIP-ERA
Volstad	Marlins	13	2	7	6.07	72.2	52	6.44	2.85	1.73	0.308	4.98	3.69	-2.38
Dempster	Cubs	15	5	5	5.48	87	82	8.48	3.1	1.34	0.32	4.15	3.31	-2.17
Vazquez	Marlins	14	3	7	6.85	71	50	6.34	4.18	1.52	0.32	5.14	4.87	-1.98
Carmona	Indians	15	4	8	5.79	91.2	57	5.6	2.75	1.37	0.281	4.81	3.9	-1.89
Beckett	Red Sox	14	6	2	1.86	92	79	7.73	2.93	0.39	0.217	2.98	3.69	1.83
Jurrjens	Braves	12	8	3	2.13	84.1	49	5.23	1.71	0.43	0.27	3.05	3.64	1.51
Hellickson	Rays	13	7	5	3.09	84.1	54	5.76	3.52	0.85	0.224	4.12	4.46	1.37
Weaver	Angels	15	8	4	2.06	109.1	96	7.9	2.14	0.41	0.24	2.54	3.4	1.34
Garza	Cubs	12	3	6	4.14	71.2	78	9.8	3.64	0.5	0.34	2.76	2.91	-1.23
Carpenter	Cards	15	1	7	4.47	98.2	78	7.11	2.19	0.91	0.327	3.52	3.34	-1.13
Humber	CWS	12	6	3	2.8	80.1	50	5.6	2.02	0.67	0.217	3.47	3.92	1.12
Jackson	CWS	14	4	6	4.47	86.2	73	7.58	3.12	0.62	0.352	3.21	3.36	-1.11
Narveson	Brewers	14	4	4	4.48	78.1	70	8.04	3.56	0.8	0.307	3.52	3.39	-1.09
Arroyo	Reds	14	5	6	5.23	82.2	48	5.23	1.96	1.74	0.297	5.08	4.17	-1.06
Gonzalez	Athletics	14	6	5	2.69	87	82	8.48	4.34	0.62	0.292	3.62	3.74	1.05
Billingsley	Dodgers	15	5	6	4.65	89	80	8.09	3.84	0.61	0.336	3.45	3.61	-1.04
Ogando	Rangers	13	7	1	2.71	83	61	6.61	2.06	0.87	0.226	3.57	3.71	1

 

Pitchers with positive variances (highlighted in red) are likely to see negative regression in their performance – their current ERA is much better than their underlying statistics would normally support.

The opposite would be true for those highlighted in green.

This regression is not always priced in to the bookies markets for these games and can be exploited.

There are a few bits of value here – sadly some of which I am too late for:

Chris Volstad was pitching today for the Florida Marlins against Tampa Bay.  The Fish were priced at 2.9 to win which is a huge price in a baseball game – remember their is no draw in a baseball game.

Also, two of the pitchers due to regress were facing each other – Jair Jurrgens of the Atlanta Braves and Alexi Ogando of the Texas Rangers – a real opportunity to back over 7 runs in the game at 1.91.

Let’s see how these games pan out to see whether we missed not only +EV but also winning opportunities here.

 

The pick

Thankfully there is one other opportunity in the Chicago White Sox v Arizona Diamondbacks game which will be shown live (for free!) on www.mlb.tv.

Philip Humber (see above) is pitching against a young rookie, Josh Collmentor.

Collmentor doesn’t appear above as he hasn’t pitched in the required number of games yet.  However, as his profile page at Fan Graphs shows, if he did would be comfortably in the top half with a 1.41 differential.

Both these pitchers will be overrated by the market at the moment.

So, lump on “Over 8 runs” at evens, whack the game on the laptop in the background and cheer on both teams and every run as they mash the ball around.  While you are at it, sit back witha beer and watch Rory bring home the goods at Congressional.

That’s my boy!

Cheers

 

BOTW: 2pts on over 8 runs CWS v DBacks @ evens

.

MLB - Introduction to assessing starting pitchers, 5.0 out of 5 based on 4 ratings