Blue Jays In Poor Shape After Getting The Runs

With little interest in tennis and cricket, July works well for me as a betting holiday month. In odd numbered years, there is no football of interest and only baseball challenges the mind . As you may have noticed, the blog has been idle while I have been travelling around enjoying some time off from my real work, and as a result, not even baseball has been followed too closely. Reader and baseball expert fizzer555 stopped by while I was away to comment:

Hi Cassini,

Joe Peta has done another of his always excellent write-ups of all the MLB teams and their performance YTD and his expectations for the rest of the season. The write-ups are in the pay for section of ESPN Insider so we can't repeat them here but, fortunately, he has used his LA Dodgers review on his Twitter feed as an example of the article and I thought, given your C_LAY-ton articles, useful to summarise it here.

The Dodgers were the best team in baseball over the first 81 games by a healthy margin even if 4 teams have a better W-L record as their results haven't fully reflected their underlying ability.

They have similar offensive stats (OBP, SLG, ISO) to Tornto for example but actually scored 100 runs less. They have the 4th best ERA and their bullpen has the strikeout potential to be the best in the league, particularly with Grandal now in as catcher.

There is no value in backing the Dodgers on a day to day basis. The betting lines on their individual games up to the All Star break have them rated as a 98 win team. Their stats say they are up to doing that although their actual win rate is on pace for 92 wins. Difficult to see any upside value then for individual games.

Their World Series price, however, is about 7.5 and not even favourite. "For now, there's clearly not much value betting them on a daily basis, but the play-offs may be a different story."

It's hard to argue a strategy of laying Kershaw when the Dodgers get priced up at such short prices when he starts, but the Dodgers look value for the NL championship and the World Series at the moment.

Compare any team's run total this year with the Toronto Blue Jays, and they will look poor. Toronto leads the league by a mile with 523 runs so far (by way of comparison, the next highest are 80 runs behind). Fizzer mentions their OBP and SLG, and the Blue Jays lead the league in the combined (OPS) category. (OBP is On Base Percentage, SLG is Slugging Percentage, and OPS is OBP + SLG).

For all the runs they have scored, the Blue Jays chances of making the post-season remain poor. With a Win-Loss record of 50:49, they are second behind the New York Yankees in their division, they are also three games back in the Wild Card race.

As for the strategy of laying Kershaw, as I mentioned before "I think I got a bit lucky with the timing of noticing Kershaw heading into a mini-slump". Kershaw has won his last three starts, and had one continued with the C-LAY-ton system, we would now 'only' be up be ~5.39 points.  

One other observation is that the Unders have come in on each of the last six Kershaw starts.