MLB 3/12 (new thread for simplicity) [Archive]

MicroBob

03-12-2005, 05:38 PM

Looking Good!!

TB 6 - BOS 4 (F) (TB scores 1 in 8th and 2 in 9th)
HOU 7 - CLE 3 (F) (HOU scores 4 in 8th breaking 3-3 tie)

MIL 11 - COL 0 (3rd)

Assuming the MIL score holds up:

YTD: 12-6-1, +8.20 units

(and to think I was just hoping to go .500 so that I could show a small profit on this)

One trend I am noticing....that may or may not have any meaning at all....is that the road-underdogs are frequently scoring batches of runs in the late innings. Sometimes coming from behind or breaking tie games.

Most of the dogs I'm betting are road teams.

The road team usually travels just 20 or so players who are going to get action in that game. The travel squad will be a little smaller if the trip is longer than an hour or so.

Today TB at BOS is a fairly lengthy trip from site to site. St. Pete to Ft. Myers is easily 2 hours. and that's for a 1pm game so they left fairly early.
HOU at CLE is Kissimmee to Winter Haven which I am guessing is 45 minutes perhaps.

Anyway....the home team will tend to give the occasional AA player not even on the 40-man roster a shot late in the game. The kind of player whose name might not even be on the roster or at least would not typically travel with the team.
I don't know if the lines factor this in or not....but it seems like the home teams have been giving up a lot of runs in late innings (at least in the games I've been betting which are the only ones I've been monitoring).

I don't know past number for W/L records of the home team in the opening 2 weeks of spring-training (before they at least bring the number of available players to a manageable and realistic number) but that was always my observation when I was in Florida during spring-training.

The away team would bring in 20 guys or so and most of them had names and numbers that matched each other.
The home team might decide to add one or two players to the mix who aren't even listed among the 60 or so available players on the spring-roster.

The idea, of course, is that some of these home-team late-inning pitchers are not quite as good as some of the away-team late-inning pitchers.

note - most teams don't save their big-league bullpen guys or closer for the end of the game. They schedule them for their work in the 4th through 7th innings or something.
Then they bring in #81 with no name to throw the 8th.
This is obviously one of the biggest differences between regular-season game-strategy situations and early exhibition-season no-strategy situations.

Just a theory....and again, I don't know if it's factored into the line or not (although almost all the road teams are dogs I have noticed...except for big-name clubs like NYY and BOS...to a lesser extent STL and ATL).

Also, it can be partly balanced out if the visiting team is less likely to travel 1 or 2 of their top position players. So it isn't just so simple as "away teams bring all their good players while home teams play all their scrubs." And, of course, it can be manager-dependent as well. Some managers like to save their closer for the 8th or 9th innings even in pre-season games to get them the 'feel'. And i'm not sure how many do or don't do this.

Just pure speculation on why I've seen so many of my road-dogs score bunches of runs in late innings.