Now that
all of the Interleague games are over for this baseball season (except
of course for the All Star Game and World Series and the one rain-out
to be made up in September) I want to recap the results for you a
little bit. I will also give a quick recap of the NHL season and the
NBA Finals (sorry for the delay).
Traditionally, we have seen betting action taper off a little bit
during Interleague play, but this year the decline was less than in
past seasons. I think bettors are getting used to betting on these
games and there is also more data available now that this change in
format has had a few years under its belt. For example, we have seen
the Yankees and Mets play before and we now have some basis for
comparing lines and results when they play now. (See
Frontlines Issue18 - The Effects of Interleague Play for more on
the effects of Interleague play). In previous years the drop off has
been as much as 30%, but this year there was a less than 15% drop from
what we saw the rest of the month on a per-game average. When you
consider that many of the regular games this month benefited from a
less-than-full schedule (fewer games means higher per-game betting for
books) then the drop, because bettors are wary, is probably far less
than 10%.
Interleague play has also traditionally been good for books because
the same uncertainty that keeps some bettors away seems to result in
more balanced action and so books can make a similar profit with less
risk. Plus, there seems to be more upsets than normal. For example
this year, who would have predicted the NL-cellar-dwelling San Diego
Rondell Whites…er Padres…would take four of six from the AL-leading
Seattle Mariners? In past years we have seen as much as a double in
the bottom line hold percentage for Interleague games over regular
games. We did see an increase over the rest of the season this year
but it was not as large as in previous seasons. It seemed like there
were fewer upsets this year and in fact, the good teams seemed to
continue to do well. I compared win percentages from the Interleague
games for all the teams with win percentages from regular league games
and the linear correlation was 64%. (For those that didn’t take stats
in college, this means that a team’s regular win % would be a pretty
good indicator of how it would do in Interleague play). Every team’s
Interleague win percentage was within 22.2% of their win percentage
for regular league play and half the team’s were within 10%. Most
improved were the aforementioned Padres (Interleague was .444, up from
.308 the rest of the way), Anaheim (.611 from .468) and red-hot
Arizona (.714 from .522). The biggest disappointments were three teams
from the AL basement: Tampa Bay (Interleague was a MLB-low .167, even
worse than their .371 league play), Baltimore (.278 down from .484)
and Texas (.222 down from .444). The Yankees had the best Interleague
record at 13-5 but that shouldn’t really count as they got to play the
Mets 6 times.
Here
are a few stats/trends from this season’s play:
NL was 136-114 (.544) up from 129-122 (.514) last season
Home teams were 135-115 (.540) up from 130-121 (.518)
AL at home was 63-62 (.504), the exact same record as last year
NL at home was 72-53 (.576), a jump from 67-59 (.532)
Home teams were 50-34 (.595) in the first game of each series but just
85-81 (.512) in the other games
For
comparison, home teams are .534 for all of 2003 (.515 in the AL and
.550 in the NL) so it appears that NL teams did a little better at
home in Interleague play than expected and AL teams did a little
worse. I said in my column on Interleague play last year that it seems
that the quality of team may be more important than home-field
advantage. I stand by that this year and let me add that oddsmakers
know bettors will overcompensate for home field advantage. Just
something to think about come next June.
Speaking of June, another very long hockey season has come to an end.
Overall it was a very good hockey season for us but the last few weeks
were a little tough. Handle was up over 120% year-over-year and that
makes hockey one of our fastest growing sports even though it is still
just a fraction compared to NFL or NBA. The playoffs got off to a
great start with big wins for the House on Anaheim’s upsets of Detroit
and Dallas (there were a few bettors that bet the Red Wings and
doubled up after each loss so the sweep was very costly for them) but
bettors had some revenge down the stretch and they did very well in
the Finals as most backed the Devils. The most costly thing for us was
a couple of large bets on the Devils to win the Stanley Cup and
Anaheim to win the Western Conference placed months ago. Usually
Futures are very good for books as the theoretical win percentages are
very large, but not on this occasion. My feeling is that if you picked
the Ducks to win the West back in January, then you deserved the big
payoff!
We also
had a couple of players do very well in picking the Spurs to win it
all months ago (they were my pick in December but mostly because I am
a Navy brat and thus a big David Robinson fan), but there was also a
lot of money on the Lakers, Mavs and Kings so we did OK on NBA
Futures. I talked about the basketball season in depth in my last
column so let me just sum up the Finals quickly. For the pointspread,
money was pretty balanced for the first 2 games but San Antonio got
heavy action on the road in Games 3 and 5 so those were big losses for
us. However, we did very well in Game 6 when bettors loaded up on the
Nets (the trend of the public liking the road team definitely
continued). Bettors had a tough time with the totals though. The
public typically likes the Over but played the Under in Game 1, the
only game to go Over the number. The public was on the Over the rest
of the way but the last 5 games all went Under so the book was a
perfect 6-0 on totals. Overall, the 2 big losses were evened out by
the wins on the totals and Game 6. We did well on moneylines and were
happy to have made a profit on the Finals after having a very tough
June last year in the NBA.
Football season is just around the corner so I will be writing more
regularly again. I’ll be back in a couple of weeks with some more
baseball analysis that I promised a couple of months ago.
I
always welcome comments, questions and suggestions via email at
rob@bodog.com
Rob Gillespie
President
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