Totals and Trends

[Raji]

You see them everywhere: guys who can’t accept that they’re no longer young and hip.

They blindly follow every youthful trend on the go, no matter how it makes them look. Over the past decade they’ve worn Capri pants, experimented with various facial hair patterns and downloaded every next-big-thing from Britain they overheard kids on the street raving about.

They all end up the same, though: foolish-looking and damned-near broke.

Trying to follow every trend in baseball could have the same effect on bettors, especially those who play totals. Oddmakers know this and tend to step back from the trend-seekers.

“We make a point of not being too reactionary to trends,” says Pete Korner, founder of the Sports Club consulting service in Las Vegas.

“We’ll have a standard deviation for every ballpark and for every pitcher. Streaky hitting or streaky pitching can move it a bit, but we’re not going to veer too far from numbers that have worked in the past.”

A pair of MLB teams illustrate why Korner and his oddsmaking cronies are in the right.

The Philadelphia Phillies and Oakland A’s are MLB’s most diametrically opposed teams and it shows in their totals records. Philadelphia leads the majors with 62 games playing over the total while Oakland is dead last with only 40.

Those numbers might not be surprising considering the teams reputations: the Phillies as an all-bat/no-arm club and the A’s vice versa. They even use ballparks that accentuate their totals trends, with Philadelphia playing in an east coast bandbox and Oakland in a stadium with more foul territory than any other MLB park.

But reputations stay with a team long after they’re deserved. The pitching-poor Phillies are allowing 1.1 fewer runs in the second half than they did in the first, while the supposedly pitching-rich A’s are allowing nearly a full run more since the All-Star break.

How, then, have both teams intensified their totals trends despite reversing their play from the mound?

In Philadelphia’s case, the bats have gone into overdrive. The Phillies’ worst pitching month was back in June, when they allowed 5.9 runs per game. The offense scored 5.1 runs per game that same month for an average of 11.0 runs in total.

Ryan Howard & Co. have turned it up post-break, scoring 6.8 runs per game since the break, meaning the average Philly outing in the second half is still an 11-run game, despite holding opponents to 4.2 runs.

The result is an over/under record of 12-6-2 in Philadelphia’s post-break games in spite of vastly improved pitching.

The A’s maintained their under-playing ways via incompetence at the plate. Their ballooning ERA since the break has been countered by an offense scoring only four runs per game. Of the Athletics’ 21 second half games, 14 of them have played under despite their pitchers’ struggles.

Numbers like that can keep MLB bettors scratching their heads, but not the oddsmakers. Whether it’s great bats or poor arms making Phillies games play over the total at Citizens Bank Park, oddsmakers look more at the result rather than the cause when it comes to totals.

Korner and his cohorts know that public bettors, rightly or wrongly, pay more attention to the day’s starting pitchers than any other factor in the ballgame. As such, oddsmakers have to cater to bettors’ expectations of pitchers no matter how hot or cold an opposing lineup might be.

“We know that’s what they’re looking at,” Korner says when asked about the two- or three-run deviation bettors sometimes see from one game to the next despite both teams fielding the same lineup in the same ballpark.

“We’re never going to put a 9 ½ on a game Johan Santana is pitching unless he’s in Wrigley with a 25-mph wind blowing out,” Korner quips.

There are rare exceptions when oddsmakers adjust a total based on a potent lineup. Korner advised his clients to go as high as possible to avoid ‘over’ bets during a recent stretch in which the New York Yankees averaged more than 11 runs per game.

“But that was an extreme case,” he notes. “Sure, we have to adjust to the situation and there’s no hard-and-fast rule when setting totals. But for the most part we’ll stay close to the ballpark and pitcher numbers we’ve developed and let the bettors follow the trends.”

Philadelphia, fresh off a 10-6 win at Wrigley on Thursday that played six runs over the total, faces the Milwaukee Brewers in a three-game set this weekend.

Oakland started its four-game series with the Los Angeles Angels on Thursday with a 6-4 loss that played over the 8-run total.


Raji