The Irony of Handicapping Baseball

[sword1]

I consider myself a good handicapper. Atleast in college football, basketball, and boxing. By this I mean I almost always turn a profit at the end of the year. However, in baseball, I almost never turn a profit. In fact I have lost the last five years. This seems to be the case with most handicappers I know anyway. I have tried handicapping baseball everyway possible and still have not won in the past. I cannot tell you how frustrating it was to hear the books were getting killed in baseball last year and I was losing my ass. In the past I;ve have always relied heavily on pitching and played alot of dogs - but still never won. This year I only assigned an average weight to pitching and guess what - this looks like the first year I will turn a profit in Baseball. Its ironic that this is the only year I have heard that the wiseguys are getting killed in baseball. Which probably means I'm handicapping wrong and just getting lucky - Go figure

[reno]

Sword1, I believe that it is no coincidence that you are only assigning "average weight" to pitching and winning this year. Bill James, a true baseball guru, debunked the popular myth that "pitching is 80% of baseball." AS James made clear in his "Baseball Abstract," pitching/defense is exactly 50% of baseball. In other words, as long as run given up is exactly equal to a run scored, pitching/defense is exactly equal to offense.

[sword1]

Reno,

Very interesting - Thanks for the info. I have always heard the myth that pitching is 80% of baseball, but never knew who said it. My father used to always say if your going to play baseball your better studying the pitchers because pitching is "80% of baseball". Ironically, my father was never good at baseball either. However, he was smarter then me in that he hardly bet on baseball. I only wish that he would have figured out that he could not beat horse racing. I think part of the reason that pitching is not as important as is was is because of the juiced ball and the fact that pitchers don't pitch as many inning as they used to, now you have to handicapp the bull pen as well.

[PerpetualCzech]

Excellent excellent point reno, you bring back memories of high school and university of hours and hours of reading James' Abstracts.

Actually, didn't he even go on to show that batting was MORE a part of the game than pitching? I think his reasoning went that since the batter has more of a say in the outcome of an atbat than the pitcher, batting was a bigger part of the game than pitching.

I think he used variance in each respective stats to show this. Even in the so-called pitching stats like SO and BB, the variance in the batters' numbers were greater than the pitchers'. For example, there was this shortstop on Oakland (Rob Piccolo?) who walked something like twice in one full season and Wade Boggs walked something like once in every 4 AB's.

I don't think you can say something like it's exactly 50-50 though just because a run scored is exactly worth the same as a run given up. Imagine the game were played with a pitching machine and everyone used the same one ... in a game like that a run scored is still worth the same as a run given up but then batting becomes 100% of the game.

BTW, James would cringe if he ever saw us using him like this ... didn't he adamently oppose gambling on baseball? What does he do today?

[reno]

PC, batting is more than pitching. Batting equals pitching + defense. Obviously if a pitching machine, which is constant rather than a variable, were used, batting would be 100% of the equation.

[reno]

Whoops, batting would not be 100%. I forgot about defense. Probably more like 90%.

[PerpetualCzech]

Right ... I was skimming over the details.

[Ronbets]

P/Czech,

Are you sure about that Wade Boggs stat? He was such a selfish ballplayer he'd even bring his mistress Margo Adams on road trips under the umbrella of Mrs. Boggs. I can't remember him taking walks for the team??-- Sorry if I'm wrong.

[PerpetualCzech]

No I'm not, let me look it up ... during his heydays with the Redsox he averaged about 100 BB a year so about 1 in every 6 AB's (or 1 in 7 plate appearances) and his highest year was 1988 with 125 walks which was 1 in 4.7 AB's.

OK, so I inflated a little bit ...