There comes a time in every baseball season where I hit a wall. Baseball season is eight months long and there are almost 5,000 games to watch, read about, discuss and most importantly bet on. My baseball consumption includes betting on games, watching in sportsbooks and home, researching player and team data and trends and listening to games on the radio.
Baseball fatigue sets in a couple times a year and I have to re-evaluate my gambling strategy. I have a fairly short attention span and after a while statistics and daily trends all become mush. I’m not going to stop consuming baseball but it’s smart for me to step back and look at things a little differently when it comes to betting.
This is usually brought on by a rough stretch of betting. This kind of evaluation period isn’t available for most other sports. When I hit a rough patch during the football season there’s only a day or so to lick my wounds and reset. The incredibly long season in baseball is so long that it allows for a lot of bets to be made but also some time to step back and slow things down when necessary.
It’s strange that I hit a bad stretch in betting baseball around the same time every year but I do. This usually happens about 1/3rd of the way through the season and again about 2/3rds of the way through the season. One thing I learned from playing poker much of my life is to slow my roll when I’m on tilt. In poker I might play much tighter or just fold a couple hands after losing a few big hands in a row. In baseball betting I step back and look at the research I use before I place bets.
Before reassessing the data I take a sports holiday for a day or two. That’s right, no sports of any kind for 24 to 48 hours. This year my break took me away from all sports on outlets like ESPN, Deadspin and Covers and brought me to Netflix where I plowed through the new season of “Orange Is The New Black”. I think that did it. I may have missed a prime opportunity to bet against Verlander but I’m refreshed and ready to dive into data, trends, podcasts and websites again.
Covers has a great tool to use to get a macro view of baseball gambling trends over certain periods of time. You can compare full game trends for straight up winners and losers, against the spread winners and losers and under/over totals. The best part of this information is that you can sort it by various time frames.
I don’t make run line bets so I can narrow my focus to my betting preferences. After clearing my head I’ve compared year long straight up and over/under total trends to the past month and week just to see how things have been overall. I use a lot of player and team specific trends and stats on a daily basis so it’s nice to step back and look at overall results. Since most trends normalize to an average you can find trends that have been running hot or cold lately that might regress back to their overall season averages.
My individual player research preferences won’t change much. I will always like pitchers with a high ground ball percentage and low HR per fly ball rate. Fangraphs provides great individual player data that I use fairly often when I’m intelligent about my baseball betting. Unfortunately when fatigue sets I will become lazy and rely on whatever I remember. This is bad. I don’t have a photographic memory and between all of the baseball media I consume I may have some recency bias and fail to remember that away teams are winning almost 49% of their games over the past month or that Jeff Samardzija has also hit a rough patch.
Now that all is clear it's back to the grind. Onward and Upward!
