2017 Major League Baseball Playoffs Discussion

Dodgers vs the Astros for the championship!

Congrats to DD for picking/projecting the WS teams. Well done sir!

It was an enjoyable year to be a Yankees fan, but their season is now over.

^TYVM for noting that, Sir. I'll take that as license to crow briefly once, and only once. Any who wish are of course free to be annoyed. Or be very annoyed. But my personal World Series has been won.

Quote: DrawingDead

...Before the CHC-WAS game I placed wagers on both the Dodgers & Astros to win the World Series, each of them booked at 2/1....

Heads I win, tails I win, lucky me. Time for me to party like it's 2015 in Kansas City again. Crowing license now expired.

With my straddle wagers booked at identical odds, mi biesboll banco has no preference, so beyond enjoying two teams that I think merit being there, I'll need to fabricate a rooting interest between them. Maybe something here will come up to supply me with that. Yuli vs. Yasiel?

A year or two, and the Yankees may be annoying many as the perennial beast of the AL East.

Quote: National Weather Service - Los Angeles

Sunny and hot, with a high near 103...

I've made some small Game 1 wagers (Dodgers ov 3.5 runs, for ex.) on the expectation of a change in the usual 'park effect' at Dodger Stadium, based on preliminary data I have for that venue from a project I've been working on to investigate some variable factors affecting run totals that I think are not efficiently priced into the ov/un betting market.

http://m.mlb.com/news/article/259362594/hot-temps-could-affect-world-series-game-1/

Quote: Mike Petriello / MLB.com

...<SNIP>...

...In 2017, the Majors slugged .391 in games where the temperature was 59 degrees or below. They slugged .479, nearly a hundred points higher, at 90 degrees and up. That's the equivalent of Kole Calhoun at the low end and Corey Seager at the high end...<SNIP>...Runs per team game were just 4.29 at 59 degrees and below, up to 4.51 between 70 and 79 degrees, 4.91 between 80 and 89, and a massive 5.47 above 90....

...<SNIP>...

I also have a handful of other small wagers on some obscure propositions that tend to have correlation in some cases to each other, and in others to game and series results, but I think are mispriced either in relation to one another or if one assumes that the higher volume headline odds are at least roughly in the right neighborhood, and I do. I think detailing them and the interrelationships would get beyond boring for almost everyone, but anyone who'd like to fade my little prop tickets should probably be betting on something like a 1-0 Houston win.

After opening in some places at around -140 (implied odds of ~58%) apparently money keeps coming in on the Dodgers to win the Series. Last night they were -165 and I understand are at -170 and even -180 (implied probability of ~64%) in some books. FiveThirtyEight prediction is at 55%/45% LAD/HOU for the eventual Series outcome. I thought fair value was around -150 or -160ish.

EDIT to add, postgame: So that old baseball cliche is true, that good pitching and calling a low strike zone beats reduced air density from high ambient air temperature. Or something like that. A cluster of wagers related to higher than anticipated scoring all lost, while the other cluster of those partially correlated to each other and/or to LA winning that I thought were mispriced in relation to the others all won. The net was a wash. I'm not sure what I think of the experience of watching the game with a bunch of these odd little props in mind. I probably won't choose to repeat it tomorrow.

I hope anybody in mourning over the untimely demise of their team or wagering ticket has recovered enough to watch the last two standing have at it. So far this has been an excellent Series, and with it nowhere near done yet I see some longtime baseball writers are debating whether it might end up being known as a "great" one or "classic."

Game 5 lines Kershaw/Keuchel are around LAD -140, HOU +130. FiveThirtyEight thinks 52% vs. 48%.

Another incredible game.

Quote: Rigondeaux

Another incredible game.

And you said that in about the 6th.

Quote:

Game 5 In-game Box Score, Top 9th:
Yikes, egads, and gabeejus frackin heist.

Quote:

Overnight Series betting line, newly revised:

Tilt.

Miscellaneous thoughts of a random irrelevant nature:

1. I think Tom Verducci is right: Historic World Series Home Run Rate may be Result of Slicker Baseballs

2. When Gurriel takes his helmet off his cool-baller-dude hairdo gives him an uncanny resemblance to a palm tree, doncha think? When this is over they should plant him in the parking lot of Dodger Stadium.



Bottom 10th addendum - list of arms potentially still available in bullpen: Me.

OMG OMG OMG. Was that about the greatest baseball game ever played? Or at least that I followed; I don't claim to be knowledgeable. I found it on SIRIUS ( driving) at the top of the 7th, managed to get back in time to see the 9th and 10th.

Learned something today. Great life hack: I might be the last to know. When you're listening to a game (was listening to PIT/DET til it ended), and you push the Info button, IT TELLS YOU THE SCORE! What a brilliant idea. It appears where you usually can see the artist/song.

Could NOT believe Springer misplayed (according to the announcers) that line drive that made it 8-7, then goes out and hits a solo HR on ONE pitch to cancel it out, first guy up after that happened. Poetry!

And 4 runs, starting there, on 6 pitches! How did LA manage to make it back to a tie? Just wow.

Btw, the Sirius announcers (ESPN radio) are a fantastic listen. Enjoyed them more than the tv guys. Might be worth turning off the tv sound and let them call the game.

Quote: beachbumbabs

Btw, the Sirius announcers (ESPN radio) are a fantastic listen. Enjoyed them more than the tv guys. Might be worth turning off the tv sound and let them call the game.

Sirius XM (they merged back in...2008? Has it been that long?) also has both the Dodgers and Astros home town radio broadcasts, complete with local commercials.

For the rest of the Series, Houston will be on channel 176, and LA on 185.

Keep in mind, however, that there is a lag inherent to satellite radio - about 15 seconds if you're listening on an actual radio or through the Roku app, and I think it's about a minute if you're listening on a mobile device. The audio and video will be out of sync unless you're watching through a DVR of some sort and can pause the video to get it to match the audio.

There are at least three audio broadcasts of the game. ESPN radio with play-by-play Dan Shulman. When he's not doing ESPN Sunday night baseball duties, he pops up on Toronto Blue Jays telecasts when one of the regulars are away (30+ games last year), and it is absolute delight compared to one of of the two regulars. Shulman is Canadian and got his chops with Blue Jays radio and television.

The other two broadcasts are by each team's regular audio crew. My favorite thus far of course had to be the Yankees broadcasts. You might not like the Yankees, but you have to appreciate John Sterling (now 28 years as the Yankee broadcaster) when he yells - 'it is high, it is deep, it is gone!!!!", though his enthusiasm sometimes gets the best of him.

Of course the Dodgers had Vin on the TV side. He is absolute gold.

As for the game last night, although I want the Astros to win, the level of anxiety both real fans must have gone through would have led one to mental collapse. What a dumb game. For the Dodgers to bring in Brandon Morrow three nights in a row in a crucial situation when they could have gone to someone else astounds me. The Astros just lacked a bullpen. Two Cy Young candidates start and 25 runs scored in the longest 9 inning World Series game ever, the same pair having pitched the shortest WS game in over 20 years in game 1?

Wow.

It had to come to this. just had to. It is right and good and proper that this will go seven. And then for the winners to collapse into a frenzied mass of gelatinous goo becoming a permanent part of the mound at Dodger Stadium, and the disconsolate oh-so-close almost winners to check themselves into a rehab farm in Malibu followed by indefinite sabbatical at a goofy hippie-mystic's secluded quasi-monastery.

At Las Vegas books the early "overnight" lines I've got have HOU at something from +130 to +135, and LAD from -140 to -150. The median of the opening brick & mortar books' lines results in an implied probability of about 43% vs. 59% (break-even pct.) with the effect of the vig. FiveThirtyEight puts it at a nice round HOU 40% vs. LAD 60%.

No line available on which player will have a moment that inspires an awesomely majestic statue in his honor, and about which approximately twelve million people will claim to have been there when he did it. And which of them will spend much of his life trying to escape being this century's Bill Buckner. But for some vague reason I can't quite put my finger on I'm looking for Puig to do something spectacular. One way, or the other.