Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Columnist Jeff Haney: Sabermetrics not just an abstract concept

Jeff Haney's sports betting column appears Wednesday. Reach him at (702) 259-4041 or [email protected].

Tim Trushel's radio show, "The Vegas Sportswire," airs 7-9 a.m. weekdays on KENO 1460-AM, and is archived at sportswireonline.com.

Michael Murray's "Betting Baseball: A New Approach" is available at the Gambler's Book Shop, 630 S. 11th St., 382-7555.

FUTURES WAGERING: Bets placed in advance, often well in advance, of a particular outcome. Examples: Betting on a football team to win the Super Bowl, or betting on a baseball team to win over or under a set amount of games in the season.

PROP: Short for proposition wager. Any exotic, unusual or offbeat betting opportunity outside the realm of straight bets, parlays and teasers. Example: Terrell Owens to catch over or under 4 1/2 passes in a football game.

SABERMETRICS: A mathematical or statistical analysis of baseball; author Bill James defined it as the search for objective knowledge about baseball. Derived from SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research. Although most sabermetricians are not concerned with gambling, some baseball handicappers rely extensively on sabermetrics for gambling purposes.

STRADDLE: The amount of vigorish, or juice, built into a betting line. Example: If the favorite in a proposition is minus 160 and the underdog is plus 130, the line is said to have a 30-cent straddle.

After analyzing the field of 30 major league baseball teams earlier this year, Tim Trushel made what he called a "substantial wager" just before opening day.

Trushel bet that the number of games won by the Kansas City Royals this season would go "under" the posted total, which was 80 1/2 in Las Vegas sports books.

His reasoning, Trushel said, could be traced to something Bill James, of "Baseball Abstract" fame, wrote more than 15 years ago. It was one of James' "axioms of baseball," and it maintains that when a team improves sharply one season, it will almost always regress in the next.

"I have been a reader of Bill James since about 1984," said Trushel, a professional sports handicapper whose radio show airs weekday mornings in Las Vegas. "His writing was a real eye-opener for me -- even though I was just a kid at the time, not a gambler."

Trushel belongs to a subset of baseball bettors who rely at least in part on "sabermetrics," a statistical approach to analyzing the game that was popularized by James, who began publishing his "Abstract" on a small scale in 1977. Some of the more arcane facets of sabermetrics entered the mainstream last year with the success of the best-selling book "Moneyball," which chronicled the Oakland Athletics' creative approach to winning despite a small payroll.

The pioneers of sabermetrics, the heroes of "Moneyball," and the gamblers who bring those concepts to the betting arena have some traits in common:

"I never stopped reading (James) and his followers," Trushel said in a phone interview. "I still use this stuff today, whether it's to make futures plays or to try to gain insight into which team could catch some breaks and perhaps go on a hot streak over the couple of months or couple of weeks."

As number-crunchers on both sides of the betting window become more sophisticated, though, it becomes more difficult for "saber-cappers" to stay a stride in front of baseball oddsmakers.

The statistic often called WHIP (walks and hits per inning pitched), for instance, was exotic 10 years ago but is routine today.

"In the early to mid-'90s, we had more of an advantage using WHIP," Trushel said. "Now, it's become part of the everyday language. It's clear that the WHIP ratio is so much more important than ERA, or earned runs allowed."

In a newly released book, "Betting Baseball: A New Approach," author Michael Murray contends that a skilled sabermetrician can indeed outpoint the oddsmaker on a consistent basis.

"I think the oddsmakers are aware of sabermetrics but they don't take it into account when they make the lines," Murray said in an e-mail interview. "Everyone can find a pitcher's WHIP in the newspaper, but ... a pitcher's slugging percentage allowed tells me a lot more than WHIP.

"Until stats like that become commonplace it is safe to say that I'm staying ahead of the oddsmaker. He certainly has the stats that I do, but he can't use them like I can."

James is perhaps best known for applying the Pythagorean theorem to baseball, through a function that relates a team's runs scored and runs allowed to its winning percentage. Fans, or bettors, use this to determine if a team is over- or underachieving.

Trushel said this approach still carries value.

"Looking at how many wins a team 'should' have (according to the Pythagorean method) can give you some good insight into which teams might be playing better than their actual record," Trushel said.

Murray, like Trushel a follower of the James Gang since the 1980s, also embraces Pythagoras. In a meaty 10-page section of "Betting Baseball," he details how he tweaks the method to create his own betting lines on individual baseball games.

"If you ask 100 bettors how to make a baseball line you would likely get 100 'I'm not sure' answers," said Murray, a former Las Vegas resident who lives in Kansas City, Mo. "... A bettor can't recognize value if he doesn't make his own line."

Especially since "Moneyball" hit it big, major league teams have been openly hiring sabermetricians, Murray pointed out. And only a small minority of stat freaks aspire to become gamblers; most probably want to parlay their ability into a front office job. Even Bill James got a job as an adviser for the Red Sox.

"One could argue 'Moneyball' will hurt sabermetrics in the long run," Murray said. "... The top talent will get snapped up by (major league) teams and the new research will be a closely guarded 'state secret' instead of thrown out into the open like in the past."

Still, at least one of James' axioms, nearly two decades old, is likely to help Trushel cash a ticket this fall: The Royals are 11-24, with the second-worst record in baseball, on a pace to win 51 games. That's well under 80 1/2.

The event marked the release of the new, third edition of "Blackjack Attack: Playing the Pros' Way -- The Ultimate Weapon" (RGE Publishing, Las Vegas, $39.99), by the New York-based blackjack expert Don Schlesinger.

Although the card-counting muscle in the room was enough to make an army of pit bosses quiver, there was some sports talk as well.

Stanford Wong, author of "Sharp Sports Betting," made his name as a blackjack player but also likes to bet "props," or sports proposition wagers.

He was hoping the move of popular sports book director Jay Kornegay from the Imperial Palace to the Las Vegas Hilton would stir up competition in the city. Kornegay has always put up a wide variety of props, and the Hilton -- which is undergoing a change in ownership -- will likely operate as an independent book.

"If one of those books were to go with a 20-cent straddle on props, rather than 30 cents, that would be very good news for sports bettors," Wong said. "Having a variety of props is nice, but it's not easy to beat them when they are dealing a 30-cent line."

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