Irisheyes' MLB Overnight Robot

[irisheyes]

7/2 Results 0-1

YTD 1-7 (-6.52u)

[irisheyes]

In case anyone thought otherwise, I was kidding of course about the line move and having followers. I wouldn't want anyone to follow where I've been for the past week.

I need some good picks to pull me out of this funk, and I just don't see much of value on tomorrow's card. Is Zambrano worth -190 (Pinny) on the road? Gut says NFW. But that line isn't up for me yet because of the pitching change, so we'll see tomorrow.

I also lean towards fading Randy Johnson, but don't like the Redbirds enough at +124. I need a break, and I have a feeling the lines will be much more friendly on the Fourth of July.

Good luck, and for those of us stateside--enjoy the holiday.

[newb411breaker19]

irisheyes, what's interesting about these various methods of handicapping is how people can end up on different sides of games based on what information the choose to use. I've done pretty well in baseball using some of the methods described in murray's book but I was often times on different sides of games than TOMG. For the batters I've been using this season, last season, and the season before that. However if a player is getting worse due to age i make some minor adjustments.

For instance tonight my line on philly was -108. I would've made a play on houston at +116 or so but I wasn't at my computer before game time. I've spent a little time now focusing on totals as well as team totals and have done okay. Don't worry about this rough posting patch as you said that you've been on a roll so you know that eventually you regress back to where you should be.

good luck man. you irish i guess? I am too.

[irisheyes]

newb,

thanks for the encouragement. I feel like my weighting of YTD versus regressed/projected stats is off--I believe I am placing too much weight on YTD. An interesting thing to note is that(in my limited experience) YTD appears to be a better predictor of the book's line than projections or previous year's stats (at least at this point in the season).

You may want to check out the various projection models (Pecota/ZiPS/etc.), since they take regression and player age modeling to a level I would never be willing to do with my current mashup of Excel and Java.

If I didn't misunderstand you, if you calc'd the true line at -108 for Philly, you'd bet Houston at +116? If so, that's only a 1.8% edge. I don't usually push any edges less than 5%. If you meant true -108 for HOU getting +116, that's a good 5.6% edge.

As far as totals, I'm pretty much terrified to trust my Murray-based model for that. My initial attempts have not been stellar, and there are a lot of manual factors (weather, umps, etc.) that come into play.

What I really need the time off for is to automate this. I'm moving from Excel to Java/JSP because I'm spending upwards of 3-4 hours/day handicapping.

Anyone know of any good sources of 2007 stats in database/machine readable format? I already have stats through 2006. I really don't want to rely on screen-scraping (web-scraping actually) to pull current stats.

Good luck to you as well. If I post some lines that look errant to you, by all means jump in. It will help me look for flaws or *gasp* improvements in the model.

And yes, I am a mick, but lately me luck's run a little dry [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

[Fraubump]

[ QUOTE ]


An interesting thing to note is that(in my limited experience) YTD appears to be a better predictor of the book's line than projections or previous year's stats (at least at this point in the season).

[/ QUOTE ]

I think this is exactly what makes betting on baseball possible. Books know that a large % of the public bases it's bets on YTD performances and creates lines accordingly. We know that a better predictive tool uses some sort of rolling average of stats for a period of years (with, of course exceptions made for injuries), so we can discount current hotness or coldness and find errors in the lines. Of course, some players do dramatically improve or decline, but I don't know of any way to know for sure who is a statistical anomaly and who has had a real change in ability. There might be some value in charting trend lines.

I think betting gets harder as the season progresses because YTD stats begin to regress to the mean as time progresses. It seems that early in a season, you get a lot of easy pickings where the betting public will get behind a pitcher who has had a couple of quality starts in a row and a YTD low ERA, despite a much higher historical ERA. Milwaukee's Chris Capuano is/was a good example of this phenomenon this year.

[newb411breaker19]

irish, the reason I chose to go back three season was mainly because last season was somewhat of an anamoly with the high scoring which most likely had something to do with pitchers not taking steroids anymore. But I'm sure using something like Pecota would be far superior as it probably has more predictive validity than what i do.

the philly example was philly -108 for me, I've noticed that the small edge bets have done quite well which obviously means that my line isn't entirely accurate but I think in baseball with all the various factors it's really hard to produce an exact line, which is why i just flat bet these games. When I bet hockey I have more faith in my line and use kelly criterion.

that would be a good idea to automate the process through something like Java.. I've never programmed before so i'd have no idea what to do. For the 2007 stats I just use a web query in excel but the tedious thing for me is getting the pitchers era and then the bullpens era as the players available switch from day to day. I'm not especially skilled in excel either, a lot of what i do is just formulas and the occasional macro with the recorder.

For the pitching I've been using this season as well as the previous two seasons. I think tomg said he used that much data and I found it better than using just the current and previous season.

[dudeimstoked]

mess with VLOOKUP in excel. it will automate a bunch of it.