Factor Playoffs, Parity Into World Series Betting Odds

The San Francisco Giants were a surprising World Series winner in 2014. (Photo credit: NicoleAbalde / Foter / CC BY-ND)


When analyzing the 2015 World Series betting odds, there are two important things to remember before you take the obvious favourites.

The playoff format and parity in baseball make it less likely that the top team in baseball will end up winning the Fall Classic.

Short playoff series

Each league effectively has four playoff teams: three divisional winners and the wildcard game winner.

Those four teams compete in two rounds of playoffs, with the team that wins two series advancing to the World Series.

Don’t forget, baseball is a marathon, the 162 game-long regular season schedule due in part to the game’s inexact nature.

That length of schedule provides an appropriate sample size to determine the best teams, but from there on in series are contested over the best of five, then best of seven games – which rarely determines superiority.

The best teams are seldom better than 60% to win any playoff game, and the same goes for a playoff series. So what does this all mean for MLB betting?

If a team was certain to make the playoffs (and no team is), they would still need to survive three short series in order to take the title.

With those series based on roughly equal parts luck, skill, momentum and health, it’s difficult to say any team is better than a 1-in-8 shot at taking the title.

Going into the 2015 MLB betting season, one team — the Washington Nationals — was given a much better implied probability.

The Nationals may have had a great team even before adding top free agent Max Scherzer. They are favoured to win the most games in baseball, with their regular season wins total set at 93.5 at Bodog.

But Pinnacle Sports’ 2015 World Series betting odds of +573 for Washington to win the championship appear to be … enthusiastic.

Value in MLB parity

The real problem with the Nationals’ odds to win the 2015 World Series is the remarkable parity in MLB betting these days.

No team has won more than 98 games in any of the last three seasons, while the wildcard concept appears to have created an environment where very few teams are truly out of the playoff running before the season.

Of the American League’s 15 teams, only two — the Houston Astros and the Minnesota Twins — are considered to have little to no chance of a playoff run, and even those opinions have their detractors.

While the National League doesn’t offer quite the same parity, only three teams — the Philadelphia Phillies, Arizona Diamondbacks and Colorado Rockies — appear to be on the outside looking in.

If those assertions are correct, and 24 teams have a legitimate shot at the playoffs, the value won’t be found in the favourites.

Instead, it would be wise to take a shot on less popular teams with legitimate chances whose market value places them outside that range.