DH in NL Stadiums - Purists Aghast

Although life is anything but 'normal' right now, the funeral is over and on what would have been my Mum's 92nd birthday, an opportunity to catch up on what's been going on for the last few weeks, which is not a lot as far as sports are concerned.

I did see some news regarding when MLB might return, and buried in the details is one little nugget that may prove useful to investors which is that:

All teams would use designated hitters.

The rationale for this rule change, incidentally one that will upset baseball purists, who at least won't be able to be there in person to witness the abomination, is that this would appear to include matches played in National League stadiums, where pitchers have long hit for themselves and visiting American League sides have had to make the adjustment.

Baseball officials said the idea would simplify things, as teams limit their travel by playing more inter-league games against local opponents. Limiting travel certainly makes sense, but this rule change, if applied, appears likely to favour the American League teams. 

I'm not sure I understand why the current rules for inter-league matches shouldn't continue. The rules are American League rules when an American League team is the home team, and National League rules when the National League team is at home.

The MLB also plan to play in empty stadiums, although as with many sports, the advantage of playing at home has been reduced with the advent of challenges and reviews.

Over the past five seasons, 2015-2019, blindly backing home teams in regular season games (straight up) would have cost you 2.49% versus a smaller loss of 2.17% of road teams. 

I know what you are all thinking, and the numbers in inter-league matches for home teams are even worse with a loss of 6.1%. 

Clearly the edge historically is on the road teams, and especially when the visiting team is from the American League and as mentioned above, at a seeming disadvantage. 

The market doesn't do a great job of accurately evaluating the win probabilities here, because in this latter scenario, the profit on the road team (straight up) is 4.9% and 3.6% on the Run Line.

How will the market adapt to the American League now having an apparent advantage in these games? Something to look for if and when the revised schedule is released and something that will mess up the statistics in future seasons! 

Doctor C, mentioned in this blog a couple of times, tweeted that he had...

As a former contract programmer myself, although many years ago now, I can identify with this unsettling state of affairs, and certainly the income was always relatively high so any interruption in employment, even short-term, wasn't a good position to be in. 

However, I'm not convinced that replacing even half of that income by short-term full-time trading is as easy as it sounds and as I've written before, when you need to win to pay bills, the stress is incredibly high, which leads to poor trading decisions. 

I wish the good Doctor well in his endeavours, and it will be interesting to follow his progress, but relying on trading as a primary income seems like a recipe for disaster. Hopefully he has six months of money put aside to cover expenses during that time and a decent bank for trading.