Another
season of baseball's cross-league mixer has come to an end and I
thought it would be interesting to discuss the results from both a
statistical and a financial point-of-view.
First,
a little background. For roughly a century, the American League and
the National League played their regular season games oblivious of
each other. The only time teams from the two leagues would see each
other in a meaningful game would be during the World Series. But five
years ago, baseball decided to add a handful of Interleague games to
the schedule each season to help sell tickets.
Purists
screamed and argued that the integrity of the game was at stake but I
think the numerous work stoppages and outrageous salaries have taken
care of that. I agree that interesting geographical World Series
match-ups such as St Louis-Kansas City ("I-70 Series" in
1985), Oakland-San Francisco ("Bay Bridge Series" in 1989),
or Yankees-Mets ("Subway Series" in 2000) lose some
significance because the teams have met but I feel that this pales in
comparison to the fact that a fan in Seattle would otherwise never
gets to see great players like Bonds or Maddux and the fan in Atlanta
wouldn't get to see A-Rod or Clemens. Another good result is that the
World Series should be slightly more competitive as the visiting teams
will have a little more practice playing by the other league's rules
come October.
The
schedule is still a mess as there are more NL teams, the divisions are
different sizes and the league wants to promote geographic rivals
every year. However, the concept is good and lots of tickets are being
sold so it isn't going away anytime soon. These games represent
roughly 10% of the schedule so as a bettor it is worth your while to
spend some time doing a little extra research.
I
haven't compiled the data for past years but I did spend a little time
going through this year's results and here are a few details.
NL won
this year 129-122 (51.4%)
Home teams were 130-121 (51.8%)
NL at home was 67-59 (53.2%)
AL at home was 63-62 (50.4%)
In
other words, there was absolutely nothing very remarkable about the
stats from this season. However, I did find it interesting that home
teams had a lower win percentage during Interleague play than for all
other games (55.2%). AL teams should benefit from carrying an everyday
DH on the roster when playing at home and NL teams should benefit from
the fact that their pitchers bat all the time (among other advantages)
but it didn't seem to be the case this year.
Interleague
play proved to be good for the House as it finished up more profitable
than the regular schedule and the failure of the home teams to produce
may be the key. According to Kent, BoDog's top bookmaker "We
always see a slight drop-off in baseball handle when Interleague play
rolls around. During the first couple of days we see as much as a 30%
reduction but by the time the last Interleague games roll around, the
bettors have a better feel and handle is restored. We did very
well on Interleague play this year including a monster win when the
Tigers went into Arizona and beat Schilling with a winless rookie
pitcher making only his second start."
For the
record that was Mike Maroth pitching Detroit to a 6-3 victory on June
14th. Not only did he hand Schilling (a -350 favorite) just his second
loss against 12 wins, but he even managed to get a base hit. Oh the
joys of Interleague baseball.
One
other interesting fact is that good teams seem to do even better
during Interleague play. AL teams that currently sport winning records
were 64-44 (59.3%) while winning NL teams were 78-54 (59.1%). It looks
like the quality of the team may be more important than home field
advantage for this portion of the schedule.
I also
asked Kent for his view on the World Cup. "Overall, handle was
much bigger than I anticipated it would be considering the start times
were in the middle of the night for a North American audience. It
seems that the game started to grow on our players as we had 7 or 8
times the handle on the final game as we did on the first big games.
We didn't make much money on the games overall but hopefully there
will be other dividends down the road such as increased handle on MLS,
Premiership, Serie A and Champion's League soccer as American fans may
be more interested and now have some experience in betting on the
sport."
I would
like to wish everyone an especially happy and safe Fourth of July this
year and as always, I welcome your comments, questions or suggestions
via email at rob@bodog.com
I would
also like to thank the many people who took time out of their busy
schedules to meet with the BoDog team on our recent tour of Las Vegas
including Jimmy
Vacarro, Jim
Feist, Doc
Sports, Big Al
McMordie, Bryan
Leonard, Don
Best Sports, Bettorsworld,
Superior
Sports and our good friend Buzz
Daly.
