Vegas Watch

A day early this week, since I can't imagine this site will be getting a whole lot of traffic tomorrow.

How good are the Angels? Sean Smith knows.

The streak lives! (See here for reference.)

The Schilling/Jack Morris comparisons are awesome.

Buster Olney, reporter? Fine. Buster Olney, analyst? No.

Something about some team that's doing well, or something.

A logo conspiracy? I think so.

A proposal (#17) to add a new wing to the Hall of Fame titled, "What The Hell, They Were Better Than Jim Rice".

The Celtics were +2800 to win at Matchbook at one point last night.

Lots of Chipper: Silver, Tango, WSJ. If anyone sees actual odds offered on him hitting .400 anywhere online, please e-mail me.

Nick Young's dunk rep suffers a setback.

True Hoop interviews a professional gambler about the Donaghy scandal.

Kornheiser on Wilbon's big night out.

Shipp is returning to UCLA.

The St. Louis under won, 39-14 (74%). Arizona is up now; we're going alphabetically the rest of the way.

Baseball Prospectus 2008 comes out on Monday. Probably the best $13.17 you'll spend this year. Unless Xavier (80:1 at BetUS) wins it all.

Very old, but this Russell Westbrook dunk against Cal was absolutely filthy.

Baseball Musings predicts how many R/G each team will score in '08. A commenter alertly notes, "Looks like another long year for Matt Cain."

STF interviews SI's Luke Winn.

Ozzie Guillen, being awesome:

‘’Then if you’re a nice guy, they are going to treat you the same way. [Expletive] it, be an ####### then. I would rather be an ####### winning than be a nice guy [expletive] losing. Give me an ####### who can win, don’t give me a nice guy who can [expletive] lose.’"

ESPN jumped the gun on the UAB-Memphis game. How does that happen? Is it really so difficult to wait two minutes?

Silver adjusts PECOTA for strength of schedule. Seattle's prediction descends even lower. 85 wins. Right.

With Leather was on the foxnews.com front page. Also from WL:

"Seriously, if I said that Raul Ibanez could run down a routine fly ball, I'd punch myself in the face, because I'd be lying."

Derek Jeter: a below average fielder!? Man, what are they smoking down at Penn?

A couple days ago Bodog posted lines on "What team will Alex Rodriguez be playing for on Opening Day '08?" I was going to dedicate a post to these, but Leitch beat me to it. Over at BP, Nate Silver had an Unfiltered post ranking all 30 teams' chances of landing A-Rod. The Bodog odds aren't even up anymore, but I thought it would be interesting to compare these two lists.


So it seems like the Angels and Dodgers are clearly the frontrunners. But after that? It's pretty unclear. The is a huge disconnect between what Bodog and Silver think about the Cubs' and Yankees' chances. The Yankees' odds are always wrong, but what about Chicago? Here's Silver's reasoning:

"The sale of the club is likely to take longer than expected, as there are rumors that the Tribune’s deal with Sam Zell is in question, and as they look for non-Mark Cuban suitors to compete with John Canning’s bid. They’d also have to be willing to commit to A-Rod at shortstop for at least several seasons because of Aramis Ramirez’ contract. I’d be shocked if he signs here."

Seems reasonable enough to me. The other big difference is the Giants:

"San Francisco fans are notoriously tolerant, they could use any offensive help they can get, and Barry Bonds’ departure leaves some cash in their wallets. But this team is probably not going to the playoffs with or without A-Rod, so this is the fallback alternative if the contending clubs don’t bite."

Trying to combine the relevant information from these two lists, here's mine:

1. LAA
2. LAD (Torre helps, I guess)
3. PHI (think about that infield)
4. SFG (what's the point?)
5. DET (I really hope not)
6. CHW (Kenny Williams is an unpredictable dude)
7. NYM (I can't see it, but this is what I'm rooting for)
8. HOU (puts them in contention in that division)
9. STL
10. CHC

Sorry, two A-Rod posts in a row. Next week I'm gonna try to look at some of the *other* FAs, and their likely destinations. That, or maybe just write 1500 words on how much I hate Marketing. We shall see.

The following may be the best opening sentence I've ever read.

"I've come to the conclusion that I should never, ever, ever turn the sound on when watching a baseball game on television."

"I always will believe that during the 1996-2001 dynasty, Mariano Rivera was the only uniformed member of the organization more important to the Yankees' success than Torre." Really, Buster?

I thought Wedge was insane to leave CC in for the 7th; The DiaTribe and Posnanski agree.

Nate Silver on the Yankees' offer to Torre.

Dan Patrick signs on with Sports Illustrated.

The e-mail from "Jacob" on FJM the other day? Yeah, that was me. I'm pretty cool.

Posnanski:

"...I was sitting in the front row, and Knight began what was supposed to be a press conference about Texas Tech basketball by talking about the baseball playoffs...Then he said, 'Anybody got any questions about the American League Championship Series.' Well, you know me...I’m not going to pass that up."

Patrick Ewing, Jr. teaching Jerry Rice how to do the "Superman" dance.

If you missed the "Shopping Penguin" video in one of the live-blogs, here it is.

Luke Winn checks in with preseason reports from Chapel Hill and Durham.

This is obviously the only series left, so I don't feel guilty about having every post concentrate solely on these two teams.

I thought it would be useful to have the details of who'll be available out of the 'pen tonight. Here are the Yankees, I'll have the Tribe in a little bit.

Yankees:

(I would include "handedness", but these guys are all righties (Edit: Except Villone; see below). Which is nice, since exactly zero of the Indians' three best hitters are right handed.)

Mariano Rivera: Pitched two innings in game two (38 pitches), and one last night (10 pitches). Probably available for two innings tonight.

Joba Chamberlain: Pitched 1.2 innings in G2 (25 pitches), two innings last night (38 pitches with a five run lead; smart move, Joe). Sheehan suggests that Torre extended Chamberlain last night because he wasn't going to be available tonight anyway. I can't find the transcript of Torre's postgame press conference last night; that may be true. If that's the case, it was REALLY dumb to pitch him at all last night. They did it because of one of the "Joba Rules"; if he starts warming up, he has to come into the game. They obviously want to protect him, and for good reason. But isn't that going a little too far, especially considering the importance of these games?

Luis Vizcaino: Threw 2/3 of an inning (25 pitches) in game two. Has not been used for more than four outs since August 11.

Kyle Farnsworth: Has not been used. Likely will not be used. Although I sure hope he is. Check out who sponsors his B-R page; that's awesome.

Ross Ohlendorf: Got hit pretty hard in game one (1IP, 28 pitches, 4H, 1BB, HR, 3ER). Can't see this guy coming into a close game.

Jose Veras: Got one out in G1 (4 pitches). Was a September call-up, and didn't pitch particularly well (9.1 IP, 7BB, 7K). No way Torre trusts him.

Mike Mussina: Has not pitched since September 28th. Face the Tribe once this year (Aug. 11), and pitched pretty well: 7.2IP, 8H, 2ER, 0BB, 6K. Since then, however, he has a 7.11 ERA and only 18Ks in 38 IP. If Wang goes less than five, I would assume Mussina will come in to bridge the gap to the actual relievers.

Andy Pettitte: I have no idea if Pettitte is available, as he just pitched on Friday, and would be NYY's G5 starter if the series goes back to Cleveland. But he's the only lefty on their entire staff though (which is amazing to me; $205MM, and no LH reliever good enough to make the playoff roster?), and Torre used him in relief twice in April.

If I'm Torre, I would bring him in in the 5th or 6th to face Sizemore, whose SLG is about 50 points lower against lefties this year (which is actually a huge improvement from his career splits).

(After writing all of that, I saw that because of a new rule, the Yankees will be able to active Ron Villone for tonight's game. Lefties hits .239/.311/.343 against Villone this year, so I guess he could face Sizemore. Also, Pettitte has weird reverse splits this year, and for his career his splits are pretty even. So there's that.)

After looking through all this, I'm much more confident about the Indians' chances tonight. Say Wang pitches six; where are those last nine outs coming from? Mussina, Vizcaino and Mo? Fine by me. If they hadn't wasted Joba last night, they could probably get nine outs out of Joba and Mo pretty easily. There's a big difference between Mussina/Vizcaino and Joba in the 7th and 8th.

Related: Is Joe Torre Overpaid? [BP Unfiltered, Silver]

In theory, this site was going to be solely about gambling, and things relating to Vegas odds (thus the name, of course). That obviously isn't how things worked out, which is probably a good thing. But it's still something I'm quite interested in.

One of my favorite things to do is to look at the Vegas lines to gauge the strength of teams. Before this site started, I did this for the NCAAs last year and Luke Winn actually posted them on his SI blog. They ended up being a better predictor of tournament success than Pomeroy's percentages (BasketballProspectus.com coming soon, BTW). So here are the percentages for each team to win the WS, according to the Vegas lines at five different sites (sportsbetting.com, sportsinteraction.com, betus.com, bodoglife.com, vip.com):

That Yankees percentage is absolutely enormous. They're 2:1 on two sites, which is pretty ridiculous. That being said, these lines wouldn't hold if people weren't betting on them, so they're clearly getting action. There are two schools of thought here.

The first is exhibited by Joe Sheehan below, but is an opinion also held by the majority of contributors to Baseball Prospectus. From his chat on Monday night:

"I can't emphasize this enough. No team in the postseason is worse than 9-1 to win it all. All four teams in the NL, no matter who wins tonight, are essentially even. So the Cubs have as good a shot as anyone."

No team being worse then 9:1 means each postseason team has at least a 10% chance of winning it all. Even if you give the other six teams the minimum, and the Red Sox and Yankees the remaining percentage, that's still only 20% each. And, quite obviously, that's completely unrealistic. If I had to guess, Sheehan probably wouldn't put any team above 14-15%. But their the Yankees are, damn near 1 in 4 odds.

How? Well, there aren't a whole lot of people out their as smart as Sheehan, for one thing.
But more importantly are the Yankee fans who think it's their God given right to throw a ticker tape parade in late October every year. You'd think, after six years of not winning, that they would understand that you can't win every year. Apparently, you'd be wrong. It would be an interesting exercise to see how ridiculous you could make the line and still have people bet on this team. There's no doubt in my mind people would be on them to win the WS at like 3:2. Even money? Maybe.

I focus on NYY because so many of my friends are Yankee fans, but the Red Sox are certainly in the same boat, if to a slightly lesser extent. Do Boston and New York, making up 1/4 of this tournament, really have a chance of winning approaching 50%? I find that pretty hard to believe. Are they the two best teams? Yeah, probably. And even by a decent margin, if you look at RS/RA (although that margin is smaller in a short series because of the strength of the Angels' and Indians' 1-2s, IMO).

That little rant went on for far too long. The point of this post, in theory, was to use the Vegas odds to gauge the strength of each team. Since I think it's pretty obvious that these lines are skewed by the size/passion/stupidity of the fan bases of the Yanks and Sox, I attempted to adjust it, keeping the relative strengths of the other six teams in tact. This is pretty arbitrary, but what are you gonna do.

That looks much more realistic, I think. Amazing that the team with the best record in the NL is dead last, isn't it? Thats what happens when you've been outscored by 20 runs, I guess. The Phillies and Cubs coming in third and fourth doesn't mean thats where Vegas thinks they rank overall, of course; that's just because the NL sucks. I'm amazed that the Indians, with the two best starters in the league, are this low, but so it goes.

Because I enjoy this thoroughly, here are the %s for each series (these are just from sportsbetting.com, the series odds are more or less the same everywhere):

COL (43.8%) @ PHI (56.2%)
CHC (54.3%) @ ARI (45.7%)

LAA (38.4%) @ BOS (61.6%)
NYY (61.6%) @ CLE (38.4%)

Yankees are a big favorite, even on the road. That obviously isn't surprising, but I am kind of amazed that they're favored (slightly, -115) on the road against a guy who's probably the Cy Young winner this year (CC).

If any Yankee fans want to complain about my bitterness in the comments that's legit, but please tell me how they are 2.5X as good as the Indians.

Related: 2007 Pythagorean Power Rankings [SkyKing 162]

Completely unrelated but fascinating: "Why Willie Randolph Should Hold Off on Buying That House in Westchester" [BP, Silver]