Baseball Betting Analysis

I've decided to use the analysis I conducted on NFL season over/unders and apply it to Baseball.

The first thing that I did was compare the Vegas estimated total wins for the baseball against the possible number of total wins. I added all the teams over/unders and got 2441.5. Which is amazing because the baseball season only consists of 2430 games. That leaves 11.5 wins unaccounted for. The reason that this occurs is that most sports fans like to bet on their team to do well. Because off all this action on the overs, Vegas moves the lines to attract the betting on the other side.

Not only are the over/unders inflated on the aggregate, they are also somewhat normalized. During the 2009 season there were 5 teams that had less than 70 wins, Vegas predicts that no team this year will have below 70 wins. There have been at least 4 teams that go below 70 wins each of the last 5 years. If I could make a prop bet that at least three teams will have less than 70 wins, I would take it.

Here is a chart that compares this years predictions vs. last years results:
For comparison, I took the variance in number of wins between 2010 and 2009. Vegas predictions have a variance of 46.56 while the actual variance last year was 126.40.

I believe most of those 11 phantom wins that Vegas is predicting will affect teams in the bottom half of the league. Fans being hopelessly optimistic will always believe (and bet) that their teams will do better than expected. For football I actually compared the teams to their schedule and used Vegas's own odds to predict how well they would do against other teams. Since I don't have time to compare a 2430 game MLB season, I think I'll just bet the under on each of the bottom 7 teams. I'll throw a little more money on the ones at the very bottom.

Even though I don't know much about baseball I can still confidently predict the results of teams that I cannot name a player on the roster. 6 months from now I'll see how good my predictions were.

Bets:
Pittsburgh Pirates - under 70
Son Diego Padres - under 71
Toronto Blue Jays - under 71
Washington Nationals- under 71
Kansas City Royals - under 71.5
Baltimore Orioles - under 74
Houston Astros - under 74.5