Another season
of baseball's cross-league mixer has come to an end and I thought it would be
interesting to discuss the results from both a statistical and a financial
point-of-view.
First, a little
background. For roughly a century, the American League and the National League
played their regular season games oblivious of each other. The only time teams
from the two leagues would see each other in a meaningful game would be during
the World Series. But five years ago, baseball decided to add a handful of
Interleague games to the schedule each season to help sell tickets.
Purists
screamed and argued that the integrity of the game was at stake but I think
the numerous work stoppages and outrageous salaries have taken care of that. I
agree that interesting geographical World Series match-ups such as St
Louis-Kansas City ("I-70 Series" in 1985), Oakland-San Francisco ("Bay Bridge
Series" in 1989), or Yankees-Mets ("Subway Series" in 2000) lose some
significance because the teams have met but I feel that this pales in
comparison to the fact that a fan in Seattle would otherwise never gets to see
great players like Bonds or Maddux and the fan in Atlanta wouldn't get to see
A-Rod or Clemens. Another good result is that the World Series should be
slightly more competitive as the visiting teams will have a little more
practice playing by the other league's rules come October.
The schedule is
still a mess as there are more NL teams, the divisions are different sizes and
the league wants to promote geographic rivals every year. However, the concept
is good and lots of tickets are being sold so it isn't going away anytime
soon. These games represent roughly 10% of the schedule so as a bettor it is
worth your while to spend some time doing a little extra research.
I haven't
compiled the data for past years but I did spend a little time going through
this year's results and here are a few details.
NL won this
year 129-122 (51.4%)
Home teams were 130-121 (51.8%)
NL at home was 67-59 (53.2%)
AL at home was 63-62 (50.4%)
In other words,
there was absolutely nothing very remarkable about the stats from this season.
However, I did find it interesting that home teams had a lower win percentage
during Interleague play than for all other games (55.2%). AL teams should
benefit from carrying an everyday DH on the roster when playing at home and NL
teams should benefit from the fact that their pitchers bat all the time (among
other advantages) but it didn't seem to be the case this year.
Interleague
play proved to be good for the House as it finished up more profitable than
the regular schedule and the failure of the home teams to produce may be the
key. According to Kent, BoDog's top bookmaker "We always see a slight
drop-off in baseball handle when Interleague play rolls around. During the
first couple of days we see as much as a 30% reduction but by the time the
last Interleague games roll around, the bettors have a better feel and handle
is restored. We did very well on Interleague play this year including a
monster win when the Tigers went into Arizona and beat Schilling with a
winless rookie pitcher making only his second start."
For the record
that was Mike Maroth pitching Detroit to a 6-3 victory on June 14th. Not only
did he hand Schilling (a -350 favorite) just his second loss against 12 wins,
but he even managed to get a base hit. Oh the joys of Interleague baseball.
One other
interesting fact is that good teams seem to do even better during Interleague
play. AL teams that currently sport winning records were 64-44 (59.3%) while
winning NL teams were 78-54 (59.1%). It looks like the quality of the team may
be more important than home field advantage for this portion of the schedule.
I also asked
Kent for his view on the World Cup. "Overall, handle was much bigger than I
anticipated it would be considering the start times were in the middle of the
night for a North American audience. It seems that the game started to grow on
our players as we had 7 or 8 times the handle on the final game as we did on
the first big games. We didn't make much money on the games overall but
hopefully there will be other dividends down the road such as increased handle
on MLS, Premiership, Serie A and Champion's League soccer as American fans may
be more interested and now have some experience in betting on the sport."
