The MLB season is now over, with four of the final day's "Hot Favourites" successful, and a Wild Card game tomorrow in the American League between divisional rivals Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees after both teams won their games. The game will be in Boston with the Yankees currently slight favourites.
The National League wasn't quite so dramatic, although it's worth noting that in the West, the San Francisco Giants needed to win 107 games to win the division, with the Los Angeles Dodgers winning 106 games. At the start of the season, the Over / Under on Giants wins was 74.5, and they became the second team since the 1994-95 strike to beat their total by 30+ games. The 2001 Seattle Mariners beat their line of 81.5 by 34.5 games, winning 116 games. For those who love history, this matched the record number of wins set by the Chicago Cubs in 1906, although the Cubs played fewer games.
I mentioned in my season preview post back in March that the New York Yankees were favourites to win the World Series, with the Los Angeles Dodgers second in the betting, and the San Diego Padres third. The first two find themselves in a Wild Card game while the Padres faded badly in the last few weeks of the season and missed out on the post season altogether.
As for the Giants, they entered the season at around 40-1 to win the Division, the longest since at least 2008 when @SOHistory started tracking these things.
For those following the systems I've mentioned in this blog, the overall results were good. The one disappointment was that the T-Bone System was a loser for the second consecutive season. One losing year in a season messed up by COVID adjustments is one thing, but the same in a normal season is another. Here are the results from last season and back to 2011:
That was really the only bad news. The Hot Favourite System had a poor start and end to the season, but the heart of the season between May and August more than made up for that. Only two of the last 28 May-August months (excluding the 2020 COVID season) have seen losses.
As for the Totals Systems, these were again profitable with the Under bets generating 88.5% of the profits from 58.7% of the bets.
So back to the playoffs and the second Wild Card game is the National League game on Wednesday when the Los Angeles Dodgers host the St Louis Cardinals.
The 'best-of-one' Wild Card games are a fairly recent development, introduced in 2012, so we only have 16 such matches to look at given the 2020 season adopted a one-off Wild Card system.
Bearing in mind the small sample, it doesn't appear that the Home 'advantage' is much of an advantage here at all. Road teams overall are 9-7 (+2.63 units) with Road Favourites 4-1 (+2.93 units), with the National League only seeing three home wins.
All of which isn't good news for the Dodgers, whose opponents are in fine form this past month including a win streak of 17 games which pushed them over the line. The Dodgers though are on a seven game win streak and are around 1.48, with the Cardinals losing three of their final five games. Resting players is one thing, but in a sport like baseball, winning becomes a habit. Back the Dodgers!
In the NFL, the five Sunday qualifiers from the Small Road Dogs System went 2-2, although I got lucky with the Indianapolis Colts who became an 'official' non-qualifier after I'd backed them as a +2.5 selection. The final selection of the weekend is tonight, but don't tell my wife or she will not be happy.
It was also a winning weekend in the Premier League with the two matches qualifying as "Close" or "Toss-Up" both finishing 2:2. When it comes to Draw betting, winning sequences aren't typical, but we now have three in a row and an unsustainable 54% ROI on the young season for the Close qualifiers, and 91% for the Toss-Ups! 
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