THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Monday, April 07, 2008

Request for Vegas data

By Tangotiger, 08:33 AM

Someone wrote me for a request for data, of which I also share some interest:

Hi Tango, I’m an occasional commenter at the inside the book blog. I’ve been looking for what appears to be an unusual source of baseball data, and I was hoping you may have heard of someone or some group who has been collecting it. ... Do you know of anyone who has collected a history of Vegas lines on MLB games?

• Sabermetrics • Forecasting

#1 (see all posts) 2008/04/07 (Mon) @ 08:45

Not that I know of, but it is possible to buy (possi bly you can request too) data from Tradesports, which is “wisdom of the crowds” type data.

There is also some old data available from the website

http://www.tradesports.com/data/

#2 Jesse (see all posts) 2008/04/07 (Mon) @ 09:53

covers.com has an archive of money lines and over/unders dating back a few years on each team’s page.

#3 Tangotiger (see all posts) 2008/04/07 (Mon) @ 10:24

Yeah, the one time I dealt with TradeSports, they were very accomodating.

#4 Will (see all posts) 2008/04/07 (Mon) @ 11:41

This website sells up to last 10 years worth of data (money lines & over/under #s):

http://www.baseball-insight.com/

You can probably make a special request to get older data than that as my database goes back to 1992 and I believe I got the early to mid-90s data from him.

#5 (see all posts) 2008/04/07 (Mon) @ 20:50

An answer to a previous question about scouts looking at stats…

“15. MB from Boston, MA
Q: Awesome guys. As a scout, do you want to see the numbers on guys before you watch them? For instance, let’s say a team has an advanced fielding metric for minor leaguers … as a scout for that team, would you rather see the numbers first or go in with no knowledge of the players’ performances statistically?
A: (Frankie) That’s an outstanding question. I personally like to have as much info on who I’m watching as possible. But, you always have to be careful of not letting that cloud your judgement in any way. But, I always keep all my info on a player, including statistics in mind. It’s nice to know your subject, so to speak.

A: (Kiley) For the sake of full disclosure, a number of baseball people think you should know nothing (or very little) and judge a guy based on his merits that you see. There’s obviously a case for both sides, I think it depends on who you’re watching.”

(saber-scouting)

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