[blogguy]

It's easy to start talking in circles whenever baseball's the topic. I think we all pretty much agree that the goal is to find numbers that don't properly reflect reality. I know a lot of people believe the best way to do this is to make your own lines. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with that...just pointing out that there are other ways to go at the question.

Your question nfleqbc about the percentages and the moneylines applies very well to baseball team sides...but not really to totals, team totals, or most of the props people are considering. And...it's not really applicable to pointspreads in the other sports (but it as to moneylines of course). Yes...if you can have confidence that a team is going to win 55-60% of the time, you can use the parameters you outlined. I'm not convinced any of us can really "know" that with confidence just yet. Given all the variables in play (particularly in baseball), I'd be skeptical of ANYONE who would say "this line should definitely be Boston -155" or whatever.

I've been doing this for a couple of decades. I've heard literally dozens of people say that you've got to make your own line. But, all of them do it differently...and all of them come up with different lines. To me that's the illusion of consensus rather than consensus.

I think it's easier to say "that's a bad line" than it is to say exactly what the right line is. Beating the oddsmakers doesn't HAVE to mean that you make better lines than they do. It just means you have to create a toolbox that finds likely mistakes.

We've seen this year that the toolbox in this sport could end up being huge. Many different people are having success with many different approaches. But, sample size is always an issue in any study like this. And, particularly with the indicators I try to come across (will Arizona start losing after a raid from the feds because of the distractions? Or because the hitter's stop juicing in fear of getting arrested?)...I don't think it will be possible to ever know if you were right or lucky...or wrong or unlucky. Best you can do is play the possibilities and put in stopping points where you "call off the jam" after a run.

Science constantly rules things out before coming to any sort of conclusion about what something is. We may not know exactly what the surface of Jupiter is like, but we can rule out a lot of things. We can't know exactly where a hurricane is going to hit landfall from 100 miles away...but we can rule a lot of places out. I'm hoping handicappers will turn their thinking a bit away from "we've got to make our own lines" and start looking at ways to "rule out" or "rule in" the lines we're seeing from oddsmakers.

Michelle Wie was -210 to miss the cut at the John Deere tournament, even though she's never made a cut at a PGA event. The evidence should have suggested that this was a bad number to anyone who thought it through. She wasn't likely to make the cut 1 in 3 times of a men's tournament. Maybe 1 in 5...maybe 1 in 7...maybe 1 in 10. Nobody had to properly determine whether it should have been -452 or -678 or something. They just needed the tools to recognize the error.

Baseball offers oppurtunities like this because pitchers have big downsides in certain situations (coming off of injuries, pitching through injuries, being a flyball pitcher when the wind is blowing out, being a pitcher who works the edges while an "over" umpire is behind the plate, being a mediocre lefty having to face Toronto, being a fly ball prone righty in Yankee Stadium when the wind is blowing out to right).

I guess you can say my philosophy is to find indicators that suggest possible errors in lines where the oddsmakers don't look to have taken these things into account...or really have no way to properly know for sure how to take things into account. Some people say the oddsmakers or the sharps account for everything...and the lines become perfected that way. I just haven't seen it....and I've seen overwhelming evidence that it's not true.

This initial run through with pitchers is just the starting point to building profiles that might help us see some of those things. I don't mean to imply that I'm suggesting any other approaches are wrong. Just trying to do something that can take advantage of the power of the collective from avid fans and handicappers. Could turn out that I just have to give up hope and go back to a cave and play with all of this stuff in private, lol...