Lines are up. Many of the pitchers have changed, so we’ll need to rerun those games.
Let’s see how we did, starting with the lines we did post.
915 Royals D. Duffy +130. We see that as a lot of value, as we think Lopez is terrible. Line hasn’t moved much. If we’re strictly going by Pinnacle openers I’d be forced into +124, but that was clearly lower than everyone else at the time, so I would have bet elsewhere or waited the minute it took to get corrected. I do think opening low was wise, of course, it just didn’t work out.
920 Cardinals D. Ponce De Leon +129 was available quickly, and we would have loved snagging that if we’d caught it - I get to do that because I posted in advance. Right now we’d have to settle for +113. That would be good enough if it hadn’t already moved so far, but the opportunity feels like it has passed.
929 Giants +160, which is now +156. This is moderate value in our minds.
Mets game has a line but no Mets starter, which is weird. It’s a seven inning game, which I’d forgotten about last night, so no bet here.
923/924 Dodgers/Rangers we would have been willing to take the early Over 9.5+101 and look like we’re getting destroyed on it. That’s the first line we really, really are happy we didn’t post for real.
925/926 Athletics/Astros we also took a similar line Over 9.5+105 and once again it’s not looking good. It is interesting that with an extra day of information, it revised this line to Over 9.5-105 which would have saved us, but that’s not the technique I was using. Damn. Overall things looking rather ugly right now.
929/930 Giants/Diamondbacks Over 8.5-116 looks pretty crazy to me if it’s a nine inning game. So far it’s stayed put.
Overall, the program did a good job of opening ‘in the ballpark’ but the line movement results are disheartening in the extreme so far. I haven’t looked back on the other days yet, but if this is typical to what happens if we hit openers, then it seems that hole in the system has been closed at some point and there’s not much to be done. Might need to consider packing it in until we can improve.
Here are our new lines:
907 Twins R. Dobnak Over 7.0-113
908 Tigers M. Boyd 138
911 Cubs K. Hendricks Over 9.0-103
912 Reds T. Mahle 127
913 Nationals M. Scherzer Over 9.5-109
914 Red Sox M. Perez 185
917 Pirates D. Holland Over 9.5-105
918 Brewers C. Burnes -188
921 Padres Z. Davies Over 13.0-111
922 Rockies K. Freeland 111
927 Mariners N. Margevicius Over 9.5+108
928 Angels A. Heaney -230
We like 913 Nationals -158. The Red Sox are a bad team, Perez is not impressive, and Scherzer is top notch. It’s a big number to pay for the Nationals on the road, but I buy what the program is thinking here.
We’re taking 917/918 Perez/Holland Over 9-103 after a drop from close to where we think it should have been. Lot of totals headed downhill today when they don’t seem like they should do that.
We also like 921/922 Over 12-102 in Davies/Freeland, our first Coors Field special. I feel pretty comfortable with this.
And then there’s 927/928 Over 9+100 for Margevicius/Heaney, along with Angels -185 which is available in a few places. Margevicius is heinous, much worse than throwing up a random minor league pitcher. I’m willing to acknowledge that, whereas this line seems to think he’s about replacement value. Of the two, the moneyline bet looks better, and they’re largely expressing the same opinion.
I suspect one of three things is happening.
Possibility one is that today is a very strange day. Given yesterday that’s quite possible.
Possibility two is that I messed up when transitioning to handling seven inning games, and now all my offensive numbers are too high. Whoops.
Possibility three is that other people are messing up because they’re not taking into account seven inning games properly, and now modeling totals as too low. Value town, population you the reader?
So the question is which is it, or is it a fourth thing I’m not considering. Feedback appreciated.
So far I’ve gotten no feedback of any kind beyond a few words of encouragement. I do realize this is a much smaller audience than I’m used to, and it’s starting out, so that all makes sense, but the void is still disheartening. At this stage, I’m in this for the feedback so I can get a better handle on things and have interesting conversations, and that’s not happening at all. On top of that, it looks like the market does a better job than it used to of knowing what we know. Within a few days, if none of that changes and sign-ups don’t pick up, I’ll have to re-evaluate writing these.
For what it's worth, I "signed up" via the RSS feed, not via the newsletter. So I'm still following but probably don't count towards your stats.
I also don't know much about sports betting, but I am interested in sports analytics as a broader topic. This means that - unfortunately - I won't be able to comment on your odds/predictions, but I would be very interested in posts that go more into how Aikido works, for instance.