Baseball talk and I got screwed by the Andover Little League Powers that be

Diamond Talk

I told myself I wasn’t going to care about the Red Sox this year. They put no effort into the offseason and come into the year looking like the bottom of the AL East. Yet I found myself finding a way to get Nesn for my TV at home because YouTube TV doesn’t carry the channel, my only gripe with the service that I rate as highly as any streaming service I’ve used.

Baseball has jaded me, If you’ve known me at all you most likely know I was screwed out of making the Andover Little League District team despite leading the league in average, extra base hits, and runs batted in that season. I have the receipts as well if you would like to see them. It’s the main reason I made the great decision to go to St John’s Prep and the subsequent decision to take my first base skills to the Lacrosse field and serve as a goalie, particularly in games where my team was either winning or losing by a large margin. Basically Mariano Rivera type duties. NBD

There is something about baseball, and the Red Sox that I am naturally drawn to and even with their short comings, I want to watch. The ability now to flip to different games and watch a whole game in the traditional length of a college basketball game that has reinvigorated my interest. Working with teams in my previous job has given me a couple of other rooting interests and a few more teams to root against. I like the game now, I like the speed, I like the homers, I like the live betting lines available throughout the game as well.

Currently I’ve been riding Barstool’s PFT Commenter’s bet against the A’s play, and it’s been a nice 4-1 start betting against Baseball’s worst team, and they happen to be a part of the Red Sox long west coast swing to start the year. I’ve been interested in the Dodgers as well, because well, they have one of my favorite players who should still be in Boston, and they have maybe the best Player of this generation in Shohei Ohtani. They make for a fun watch and a nice night cap to fall asleep to on the West Coast.

I’ve spoken a few times on the newsletter about some of the gaming system’s we’ve built at RoadMap, and with Hockey season coming to a close, I am working on building a Baseball Model using our Trailblazer light system. This tool allows me to take data from games provided by the MLB, and forecast out specific statistical sets to build predictive models. We have had great success in the NHL picking goaltender saves and I am interested in what statistics we can work into an MLB model. This system is not available to the public quite yet, but if you’d like to play around and test it out, please shoot me a text or a LinkedIn message and I’d love to gather some feedback from you.

Which is my ask to you, the reader. What is the most fun bet in baseball? A few that I have been tracking.

Starting Pitcher strikeout

I’m drawn to this because of the Red Sox staff who have been striking out batters at an impressive rate, and the model tracks similarly to goalie saves, however my concern lies in the small numbers for projections.

Batter Parlays

This is in my opinion the most fun of the options, picking 3 or 4 batters to get a hit and parlaying it to around a +300-+400 play. These often are accompanied by boosts in the sportsbooks and can be pretty solid payouts at lower risk than the odds portray. The issue is guys can get pinch hit for late and you’re dead or have an off night not indicative of their predictive statistics. The Books also juice the more popular players down, and that may lead to a more robust investigation.

Run Lines

This is a profitable play when we can identify a significant pitching mismatch. The system can easily predict runs for teams based off prior performance and we should see some glaring opportunities for value in our models.

First Inning lines/First 5 innings

This is very popular among the podcast touts, which is far from what I’m trying to be to be clear. However the NRFI and RFI bets are a lot of fun and pay out in the first 25 minutes of a game. If we can identify pitchers who get out to strong starts and teams that keep the bats cold until a few innings in.

What am I missing? Please comment some suggestions and I will work them into the model, I have a Twitter set up that you can follow where we will be sending out the picks and tracking records for each stat, which will help us better understand which bets the model is best at

Twitter link 

Next week as we are compiling data, I will share a look into trailblazer to show you how we are able to create these models and easily generate results that best compare to the lines from most generally available Sportsbooks. It’s baseball season like it or not, and we are going to make the most of it.

Final Note. Finally got out to the course, gutted through a round of slapping it around and coming way over the top. Got a lesson after and the boy is dialed. We are going to stay closed at address, get the side tilt and pull our hands back off the right thigh. Left Shoulder gets to the right thigh and then we’re mashing bombs. I’ve been writing that down daily to drill it in my head and this is no exception.

Til next week. Thanks for reading

TT