Regular Season October Baseball

It's the final weekend of the 2015 MLB regular season, and a good time to look at whether or not it is a profitable strategy to back the hot favourites in the play-offs. Unsurprisingly there are fewer such opportunities in post season play, an average of 10 a season if we define hot favourites as those with an implied probability of 60% or greater (1.6).

If we relax the constraint on 'hot' to 'tepid' 55% or greater implied probability, we get more selections - but an even worse outcome.

And if anything, the returns on favourites in the play-offs have declined over recent seasons.

The competitive nature of the post-season appears not to be kind to favourites. Note that down for the next few weeks.

Jeffrey's observations on the fate of favourites and underdogs at different times of the season resulted in me taking at look at results by moth over the last five seasons. Only May shows a loss for hot favourites (sub 1 .51) but I'll wait for the 2015 regular season to finish this weekend before publishing all the numbers.

With a couple of likely qualifiers today, namely the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Pittsburgh Pirates, some of you may be interested to know that hot favourites in October have a 100% record at 6-0 since 2011. Bizarrely, three of those six were on one single day, which was yesterday, and all three won. Happy days.

The Dodgers tonight are currently 1.41 on the exchanges, with the Pirates at 1.48. 

Hopefully, it's not meaningful that the six winners have all been against Right-handed starters and tonight's are both Lefties!