We saw in my Home Field Advantage articles that home field advantage in baseball decreases as the series progresses to the point that by game 4, it is as if the game was played on a neutral field. Since the Vegas odds have yet to take this into account, we can capitalize on a small system playing on road favorites. Favorites are defined as a team that has the highest likelihood of winning and the odds express its probability of winning. We have the suspicion that road favorites should be bigger favorites when playing in the fourth game of a series by nature of the fact that Game 4 turns into a neutral field. Give our team the motivation necessary to close out the series strong and we have a pretty good yet rare system. Losing game 3 should be sufficient motivation for our favorite in game 4. Our team is about 8 points undervalued and it is +15 units over the past 7 seasons. If our team happened to lose by exactly one run, the system improves to 39-17 over the past 7 seasons, +17 units making our team undervalued by 30 points! Out of approximately 17,000 games this system has only been in effect 56 times which is about once every 300 games. So is it no wonder why a system like this can prove to be strong and profitable year after year? |
