Betting Futures Show American League Has Most Parity In Recent History

Much has been said about the parity of this year’s American League and the wide-open nature of the pennant race. The Washington Times called 2015 “the year of parity,” and before the season, a Baseball America headline declared that “Parity Makes AL Races Tricky To Predict.”

Are these claims actually true, though? To check, I collected All-Star break pennant futures from Las Vegas and offshore for the last four seasons. Using futures is a better metric for determining parity than win totals, as betting odds factor in injuries, trades, and projected trajectories over the course of the season while also cutting through the statistical noise that comes with win totals, which aren’t always a very good measure of team performance, both past and future.

For each season, I ranked each team’s odds from the No. 1 favorite to the greatest longshot and plotted them on a chart. If this year’s AL race is as wide open as many claim, we would expect to see a much flatter line from the No. 1 team to the last-place team relative to other years, with longer-than-average odds for the top few teams and shorter-than-average-odds for the later teams.

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*Vegas win probabilities are derived from the implied percentages from betting odds (i.e. 4-1 would convert to 20%) and then dividing these percentages by the sum of the implied percentages on every team (generally around 130%) so that they total to 100 percent.

At first glance, that’s not the trend we seem to see. At the all-star break, the favorite Royals did have lower-than-average pennant probabilities for a division leader (17.2%), but they weren’t quite as long as those of the 2012 National League-leading Washington Nationals, which had only a 14.4% chance of winning the pennant.

From the chart, the only real area you could clearly claim there’s more parity in this year’s AL is at the bottom of the list, where the basement-dwelling 12th to 15th-best teams (Seattle, Chicago White Sox, Oakland, and Texas) have slightly better odds of winning the pennant than basement-dwelling teams of years past did.

However, the above chart only allows for a rough eye test. A more comprehensive way to measure distribution in a group is with an economics metric called the Gini coefficient. Gini is measured on a scale from 0 to 1, with 0 being perfectly equal and 1 being perfectly unequal. If this year’s AL were more wide open than years past, we would expect to find a low Gini coefficient.

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That’s exactly what we see. There’s quite a large difference in Gini for the 2015 AL than for pennant races of years past. This is largely due to the strength of the bottom teams. While these basement dwellers are still unlikely to advance to the World Series, their probabilities in the 2-4% range are orders of magnitude greater than typical teams that low on the totem poll.

There are certainly some strong A.L. contenders this year, but the crop at the bottom with realistic chances of playing late into October makes this season’s pennant race about as wide open as it gets.

Follow Jim Pagels on Twitter at @jimpagels

Betting Markets Declare Spurs Largest—And Only—Winners Of NBA Free Agency Period

There’s been much discussion about the San Antonio Spurs’ impending juggernaut given the team’s summer acquisitions of LaMarcus Aldridge and David West, re-signing of Danny Green and Kawhi Leonard to what have widely been considered very team-friendly contracts, and retaining the services of Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili from retirement.

Not only were the Spurs the unanimous choice of offseason winner by a panel of ESPN experts and described as “clear cut winners” of the summer by FiveThirtyEight—the betting markets declared them, well, the only winners (or just about).

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*Vegas win probabilities are derived from the implied percentages from betting odds (i.e. 4-1 would convert to 20%) and then dividing these percentages by the sum of the implied percentages on every team (generally around 130%) so that they total to 100 percent.

It’s clear there’s only one real winner according to the futures markets: the Spurs, who made a huge 8.9 percent jump in implied championship probability, nearly tripling their pre-deadline title chances. (Other books had the jump as being even higher.)

A big reason the Spurs were the only team to make such a massive jump was not because they were the only team to sign a star player, but because they were the only team to do so that was not already widely expected to. LeBron James and Kevin Love both re-signed with Cleveland, the team with the best odds both before and after the deadline, but those were highly anticipated deals already baked into the Cavs’ pre-deadline odds. It’s the same situation for Marc Gasol and Memphis.

With the Spurs’ odds improving so much (San Antonio is now ahead of the defending champion Warriors but behind Cleveland for the 2016 title favorite), the perennial contender took percentage points from many other teams in the zero-sum system. Thus, only four of the 30 teams actually improved their title chances during free agency.

The Cavs, who dispelled the tiny amount of uncertainty surrounding their free agents, the Warriors, who re-signed Draymond Green, and the Bucks, who surprisingly landed Greg Monroe on a max contract, all saw minor bumps, though small enough to possibly just be market fluctuation noise. (For example, other books had the Warriors’ odds growing slightly longer after free agency.)

The remaining 26 teams had either zero or small decreases in championship probability.

At the bottom of the list, the team to suffer the greatest drop was the Aldridge-losing Blazers. Though their probability only dropped by 1.4 percent, given that a) their odds were already long with Aldridge, and b) the betting markets clearly had already anticipated the All-Star center would leave Portland—it was simply unclear which lucky suitor would land his services.

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For current NBA futures odds, courtesy of Las Vegas SuperBook, click here

2015 Women’s World Cup: Group Play Has Almost No Impact On Betting Markets

They say the Masters doesn’t really start until the back nine on Sunday*, but that’s not really true at all. Between the opening round Thursday to midday Sunday, the betting odds wildly shift, with many pre-Augusta favorites falling entirely out of contention and longshots becoming much shorter.

*Ironically, this may be the least appropriate application of the “the beginning of the event/season doesn’t really matter much” axiom. The regular seasons of almost every American sport are far less significant in determining the eventual champion than the opening rounds of a golf tournament are.

A more apt phrase may be that the Women’s World Cup doesn’t really start until the knockout round. That stage of the tournament starts this weekend, bringing significantly higher leverage to each game in terms of determining the eventual champion.

Sure, there were many exciting moments in the World Cup group play round, but they were merely among teams with almost no chance to win the tournament. This is in large part due to the new format of this year’s event. In previous Women’s World Cups, there had been 16 teams divided into four pools of four. Because only 50 percent of teams passed to the eight-team knockout round, there was a much higher bar to clear during the group stage for serious contenders, resulting in elite teams facing elimination and substantial shifts in the betting odds between the start and conclusion of the group stage.

This year’s expansion of the tournament to 24 teams shook things up, though. With the teams still organized into groups of four (this time six groups), advancing two teams from each group would produce a 12-team bracket, which does not neatly divide by twos to produce one champion. This meant that, assuming the tournament was set with 24 teams and groups of four, FIFA had three options for arranging the knockout round:

  • Have the top two teams from each group advance and create a a 12-team bracket in which the four top teams receive byes
  • Have the top one team from each group advance as well as the two best second-place teams to produce an 8-team bracket
  • Have the top two teams from each group advance as well as the four best third-place teams to produce a 16-team bracket

The latter would produce the least exciting, fair structure for the pool play round, and unfortunately, that’s exactly the format FIFA decided to go with.

With the new structure, the tournament will spend 36 group stage games determining how to eliminate a mere eight teams (and the eight worst ones at that) and then only 15 knock-out round games determining how to eliminate the 15 best. That’s a games-to-eliminations ratio of 4.5-to-1 for the group round vs. 1-to-1 for the knockout round. (By comparison, the men’s tournament has a group stage games-to-eliminations ratio of 3-to-1, the same ratio in previous year’s Women’s World Cups.)

Because only the lowest of teams are eliminated in the group stage, and there was never really any threat for the true contenders to not clear such a low bar to reach the knockout round (some teams were over 99% likely to advance according to FiveThirtyEight’s model), the group play games seemed rather insignificant, and that’s exactly how it played out. Only one team that was expected to advance to the knockout round by FiveThirtyEight’s metrics did not, and by only a tenth of a WSPI point: Columbia (80.3 WSPI) over France (80.4 WSPI).

The betting markets also suggested the group stage—which represent 70 percent of the tournament’s total games—had extremely little impact on the championship picture (via OddsChecker):

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Note: The win probabilities are derived from the implied percentages (i.e. 4-1 would convert to 20%) and then dividing them by the sum of the implied percentages on every team so that they sum to 100 percent.

Sweden and Germany are the only two teams who had greater than 2.5 percent changes in championship probability after the conclusion of the group stage. Sweden’s odds shifted largely due to its group stage struggles, which pitted it against top-ranked Germany in the first round of knockout play, while Germany’s boost came in large part due to its dominant performance in the group stage (which included a 10-0 thrashing of Ivory Coast). The Germans unsurprisingly advanced Saturday, 4-1.

What would have been a far better solution for structuring the new 24-team World Cup to increase market fluctuation during the group stage would have been to arrange either an 8-team knockout round or a 12-team one with byes for the four top group winners. Again, the group stage consists of over 70 percent of all the games played in the tournament, so putting more weight on those games should be of great importance for both the entertainment and fairness of the event. Such alternative structures would, of course, cut down on the number of games compared to the current, new format, but given that the tournament is already expanding this year, it would still be a growth compared to year’s past.

NFL once again highlights hypocrisy on gambling

You can bet the NFL will continue double-talk when it comes to gambling—that is unless you’re a player. In that case, no bets, or even the faintest of association with them, is allowed.

This past week, the NFL canceled a Las Vegas fantasy football convention set for July 10-12 that would have included appearances from stars Tony Romo, Rob Gronkowski, Le’Veon Bell, Antonio Brown, Eddie Lacy, Jamaal Charles, DeMarco Murray, and many others. According to multiple reports, the league allegedly threatened to fine or suspend players who attended the event.

The NFL also nixed a similar Vegas fantasy football convention set to occur the next week, this one including stars Von Miller and Brandon Marshall. Per ESPN’s Darren Rovell, players were set to receive more than a combined $1 million in appearance fees at the events.

According to an NFL spokesman, the restrictions are due to the league’s rules against players and personnel participating in promotional activities held at casinos. This public stance stems from the league’s alleged concerns that any relationships with sports betting put the integrity of games at risk. However, the notion that Romo, who is set to make well over $100 million in salary alone by the end of his career, is susceptible to meeting a potential match-fixer at the blackjack table, who could somehow convince him to fix some games, is preposterous.

Of course, there were many other players making far less than Romo expected to attend the conventions, but it’s an incredibly outdated notion to assume a hypothetical match-fixing bogeyman would want to conduct his business under the highly surveillanced eyes of Vegas casinos or within well-regulated, transparent betting markets. (And if anything, it’s the league’s repeated lawsuits against states attempting to legalize gambling and make it more transparent that allow any risk to persist. If there is any match-fixing risk, it’s of the NFL’s own creation.)

It’s far more likely that the league is simply annoyed at the prospect of potential revenue flowing to outside sources—in this case Vegas casinos and event organizers—and it’s likely only a matter of time until the league cuts out these middle men and launches a fantasy football convention of its own.

Despite repeatedly invoking “do as I say, not as I do”-type arguments, the NFL has adamantly claimed an uncompromised stance against sports betting. When the league allowed casinos to purchase advertising at stadiums in 2012, raising many eyebrows about its anti-gambling rhetoric, the NFL released the following statement:

“These policy modifications are designed to ensure that all permitted gambling advertising by NFL clubs is executed in accordance with industry best practices, is intended to target adult audiences, is consistent with the League’s continuing opposition to sports gambling, and minimizes any potential negative impact on the NFL brand.”

Here are some of the many other conflicting stances and decisions the league has taken over the years on the matter:

  • Allows Rooney family to own racetracks with machine gaming in New York and Florida
  • Plays games in London, where sports betting is legal and regulated
  • Embraces fantasy football
  • Rumored to be starting its own daily fantasy product
  • Mandates weekly injury reports, which largely serve to help bettors
  • Embraces sponsorships with beer companies, rather than alcohol prohibition
  • Licenses logos for state lottery scratch-off tickets
  • Allows broadcast partners to discuss betting lines
  • Charges Vegas sportsbooks to carry live feeds of games
  • Allows casinos to purchase ads at stadiums

Roger Goodell and the NFL have publicly denounced legalized gambling for decades, and that stance is unlikely to change so long as sports betting remains widely illegal in the United States. This is likely to be another bargaining chip to be debated at the next round of CBA negotiations.