THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I think also, in this case, Halladay was always pitching against a good Yankees team with the same basic offensive philosophy, get on base and hit home runs.  Roy’s strengths work against that philosophy.

The main elements of a good preview for determining expected outcomes are how a particular team and individual players have been playing coupled together with their overall talent, and what the pitching matchups are (eg # 1 SP’er vs # 5 SP’er).

How a team is playing at any moment in time is perhaps more important than how good they are over 162 games. 

A baseball team has 5 quarterbacks.  A 400 team running out their best quarterback going against a 600 team running out their 5th stringer is probably going to win more than 50% of the games.

Also, how a team collectively is playing over the last 10-20 games may be more predictive than their season record.  It is important that one factor in the quality of opponent as some teams that appear hot have simply been playing some cold/bad teams.

The Phillies are a great example.  On paper they look like a very good team, yet anyone who has played them the past 2 weeks has been very fortunate.  They have been making virtually every starting pitcher look like Cy Young.

They have either broken out of their hitting slump, or AJ Burnett pitched a very bad game tonight.  I suspect the latter based on how the Yankees bullpen shut them down after AJ left.

As for SSS team/player matchups, I think how a pitcher or hitter is going at the moment (hot or cold) far outweighs these stats.  If both are neutral, then they may have some value if extreme, but a pitcher/hitters day to day randomness, not to mention the umpires strike zone tends to make such predictions wrong more often than not.

The Red Sox have had some pretty good success against Halladay for example, but when he gets an umpire with a wide strike zone, they have trouble, since that negates their main strength, which is patience and working the count.

I guess that’s why betting on individual baseball games is not too popular.  Even if you nail all the important variables, which is hard, then you have to contend with luck on BIP or 325 ft grand slams.  Best you can do is predict who may win a given series, and even then, don’t bet the farm.