The 2008 Baseball Season has gotten off to a positive start for SportsInsights.com’s strategies. Thanks to the suggestion of some of our Members, SI’s researchers took a look at how “Betting Against the Public” fares during various parts of the season. Do we always do particularly well during the early part of the season? What about near the end of the season — when teams are driving for the playoffs? With more than 11,000 data points over five seasons, baseball shows robust results throughout the season and impressive statistical results for the entire data set. The information on this site is for entertainment and educational purposes only. Use of this information in violation of any federal, state, or local laws is prohibited.
MLB Database (2003-2007 Seasons)
SportsInsights’ database for MLB now includes over 11,000 games over the past five seasons. For the purposes of this article, we include the playoffs, but exclude spring training. Similar to hockey, baseball is a “moneyline” sport, so that we emphasize “units won” (and not winning percentage). For the purposes of this study, we split the season into three sections, as follows:
Betting Against the Public during the Season
Our regular “MLB – Betting Against the Public” article, published a few weeks ago, shows that fading “Joe Public” at the 30% level yielded +131 units over the past five seasons. Here is how the results look — broken down by “part of the season.”
Table 1: MLB and Betting Against the Public Broken Down by Part of Season
(2003-2007 Seasons)
Betting % Threshold | Early Season(Before June) | Middle of Season(June, July) | End of Season(After July) | Total |
30 | +3 | +103 | +25 | +131 |
Using the Table
Some Notes
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Disclaimer
We do not guarantee that the trends and biases we’ve found will continue to exist. It is impossible to predict the future. Any serious academic research in the field of “market efficiencies” recognizes that inefficiencies may disappear over time. Once inefficiencies are discovered, it is only a matter of time before the market corrects itself. We do not guarantee our data is error-free. However, we’ve tried our best to make sure every score and percentage is correct.