Hey Everyone,
last year I had a thread running for anothr system that worked, but didnt work as well as it did the three years before. During the year I read into Sabermetrics more and more and came up with the idea to try and build a database with all the needed statistics to try to pick winners in this years MLB season. It took me quite a while to get everything going (excel-file is about 60 MB) but I am finally done as of now and will get my toes wet during spring training.
I highly encourage NOT to follow at this point in time, I use covers as a place to track my picks and find out how good (or bad) my sabermetrican approach will work. I was inspired by the work of Sports_Network but made some minor changes to his approach, I might get into more details later on. The MAJOR difference to his thread will be that I will post the attached units before the games start :-)
Anyway, the general approach is very similar:
1) I will use sabermetrics to determine the (based on historical data) possible outcome of the game with two approaches: a plain sabermetric approach with BsR and RC. The second approach is a monte carlo simulation, based on historical data AND is including all the different possible outcomes of EVERY at bat, basically simulating every game about 100.000 times. The monte carlo simulation should be ready to go by the end of march. The scores from these two approaches will then be translated into winning% and then into odds.
2) Based on the outcome of the approaches above, I will then have a couple of different posibilities to bet.
a) Big favorites will be run line plays, units depend on the difference in a) runs as of my model and b) the odds from the bookmakers.
b) There will be quite alot of games where the wrong team will be favored due to public attention etc. These games will be straight ML picks and will only be played on dogs obviously.
c) There will also be games where the favorite is correct, but due to public attention the price of it (the line) will be much too high. These will be pure value plays on the dogs, as most of the time the favorite will win but at unattractive prices.
4) Over/under bets will also be included, although this is the area I have spend the least time on as of now. This is where I will work on now to be ready when Spring Training kicks in for real (I hope I will have this adressed by the end of the weekend).
As you can see there will be quite some battlefields and I also have to state that there will be more often than not a schedule full of games for me, as my backtesting showed me that (leaving O/U aside) during a normal day with 14 games I will probably have 6-9 picks.
Once again, I do NOT recommend to follow right from the start, backtesting was nice but picking games BEFORE they start is a whole different animal. I cannot say at which day my picks will start, especially in Spring Training its hard to get the lineuos of the games PLUS the pitchers will change that often that its hard to run a simulation on that.
Anyway, my goal is to make 100 UNITS per season, my plays will be for 1,2,3 and 4 UNITS and this is all you need to know as of now :-)
I wish all of us a sucessful season and am happy to discuss the games as well as the approach itself.
Hi Folks,
I guess this question came up here at covers quite some time before but I was wondering if anyone has done some research on Sabermatrics regarding baseball? Did anyone set up a prediciton tool? Using sabermatrics or a monte carlo simulation or anything? I am really interested in this topic and would love to hear if anyone has experience with this. I have some really smart computer guys as firends who are willing to give this a try, I jusst dont have the real idea how to start this...
Thanks for your comments...
Call82
I was just wondering...I was in the states a couple of times and it just made it more fun to watch the games when you had some money involved...I guess I am just a degen...
How did you guys start betting?
Hey Folks,
As you can see I havent contributed to this site very much although I have been around since late 2007. I was basically trying me own research and came up with something I would like to share here. I know ist a chase system and I know how people think about it and they have a fair point with it. I backtested it back to the 2004 season and it payed off very nicely in each and every season. Over the course of the last 5 seasons that the worst season still made 54,6 Units and I played it the first time last year and made 108,73 Units. Anyway, here it is:
The systems foundation is the fact that the MLB is very close and the best and worst teams are not that different (witch respect to the win%) when compared to other sports. Taking into account that the baseball season has the "special item" that the games are played in series (3 or 4 games at one place in a row) and that only in 10-15% of these series the home team looses all three or four games, made me suspicious (please excuse my english, I am from Germany and doing my best ;-)). When you delete Washington from this equation, the sweeping factor for home teams get reduced to something in between 6 and 8%.
Now lets get to the point: I divided the league in 3 groups with the best teams being in group 1, the middle in group 2 and the worst in group 3. What I basically do is chasing the 3 or 4 game series until the home team won a game. Here I have different approaches in respect to the teams that are playing (and then the group they are in).
I start the series with the first home game for every home team from group 1, regardless who they are facing. If they win the first game, I am done and leave the other 2 or 3 games of the series behind. I play 1 Unit on the home team, if they win I am done there, if they lose I am going to bet the amount to win 2 Units in the second game and so on.
With teams from group 2 its a little bit different, here it depends who is the visitor (and from which group). If a 2 team is playing at home and the visitor is from group 1, I wait for the result of the first game. If the home team wins, the series is over and I was just too carefull. If the home team loses, I will start with 1 Unit in the second game and then the same system occurs as above. When a team from group 2 hosts an opponent from group 2 or 3, I will start with the first game of the series since its not that likely they will lose all 3 to a not-premium-team.
When it comes to teams from group 3 I will only start with the first game when the visitor is from that group too, if not then I wait for the second game and depending on the result I will play it or not.
I hope you can follow my explainations here, I know ist a chase but it paid very well over and over in every season and since I use the statistic approach with the home sweeps, I dont see why it shouldnt stay like this. With teams from group 2 and 3 I am just beeing carefull with respect to the opponent, every once in a while you will see a home-sweep and the you lose less than with a start in the first game. I would really love to hear opinions from you guys!
Since I dont know much about baseball (they dont show it here in Germany, I barely know the players, I just did spend some time in the US and love the game) you can tell that my approach is more about statistics and research about trends within the game itself, not the players.
Looking forward to your comments, This year I will also start to post all my plays here so you can see the results (hopefully positive again ;-))
...I have been following a couple of guys here (AJ, Gamehunter...) since quite some time. Since I live in Germany I dont follow baseball in TV that much but I basically focus on the math and statistic part of the game...
Lets see how things will work out since I will start posting my picks this season for the first time...
GL to everyone and lets all make some