Morning y’all. Welcome to week three of Nosebleed Sports!

Today marks the official beginning of our new content strategy. If you’re new here or missed the announcement in last Friday’s newsletter, every Monday moving forward we will be conducting a deep analysis on a certain sports topic. So without further ado, let’s dive in.

It is MLB All-Star week, which marks the unofficial “halfway” point of the baseball season, so on this beautiful Monday morning, we will be talking all things baseball… such as:

• Who are the (statistical) World Series favorites ⚾️ 

• Who has been getting the luckiest 😏 

• Individual award frontrunners 🏆️

Let’s get ‘er going.

Braves big favorites to win 2023 World Series

With a 60-29 record, the Atlanta Braves head into the all-star break with the best record in baseball. The Braves have an elite lineup and pitching staff, evidenced by them being 2nd in runs scored per game, and 3rd in runs allowed per game. They simply have no weaknesses.

Everyone and their mother are picking the Braves to win the World Series, and after doing some research I am one of those people too. Let’s look at why.

For this piece, I developed a rankings of World Series win probabilities using data from FanGraphs, Baseball Reference, and DraftKings. FanGraphs and Baseball Reference are elite baseball resources (they have every stat you’d ever want) and sportsbooks like DraftKings have such sophisticated probability models that I often deduce the implied probability based on the betting odds.

I then averaged the probabilities of these three resources to develop the “NOSEBLEED SPORTS RANK” which is a composite ranking that weighs each resource’s probability equally.

So here I present to you, the Nosebleed Sports World Series Win Probability Rankings:

My favorite thing about these rankings is the aesthetic for sure. Spending all that time entering the exact color codes for every team was 100% worth it 🥲 

But as we can see, the Braves are heavy favorites to win the World Series with an average win probability of 24.6%.

The Rays and Dodgers are in what we would call tier two, with a 13.7% and 12.9% chance to win the Fall Classic, respectively.

Other potential contenders include the Rangers (8.0%), Astros (7.0%), and Blue Jays (5.3%)

Sure looks like it’s the Braves championship to lose at this point the season.

Nerd Notes 🤓 

How to calculate probability from (American) betting odds

Positive Odds Formula

100 / (100 + American Odds)

Example: +300 American Odds

100 / (100 + 300) = 100 / 400 = 0.25 or 25% implied probability

Negative Odds Formula

Absolute Value of American Odds / (100 + Absolute Value of American Odds)

Example: -300 American Odds

300 / (100 + 300) = 300 / 400 = 0.75 or 75% implied probability

Baseball’s luckiest teams

Another cool statistic from Baseball Reference is the Pythagorean Win-Loss, which is a teams expected record based on their number of runs scored and runs allowed throughout the season. When you compare this to a teams actual record, you can determine which teams have been getting lucky (😈) and may be due for some negative regression, and vice versa.

The lucky ones 🍀 

The Marlins, Orioles, and Reds have been the luckiest teams so far this season. Very interesting how there seems to be a correlation between the teams that the experts say are “having breakout years” are the teams that have been the luckiest so far this season 🤔 

Poor guys 😕 

Here are my takes on this:

• The Rangers are legit World Series contenders

• I expect the Padres to go on a heater in the second half and make a hard push for a playoff spot

• The Twins are a very underrated baseball team with excellent pitching

(those earlier sexual innuendos all make a little more sense now huh 😁)

MLB Awards

AL 🚩

MVP

Shohei Ohtani.

Next question.

Look how ridiculous this is:

88.9% implied probability to win MVP in July!

Cy Young Award

Framber Valdez is the current favorite to win the award for the AL’s top pitcher, but I gotta go with my guy Kevin Gausman at +350 (22.2% p[win]).

Gausman is a strikeout machine and leads Major League pitchers in fWAR at 4.0. I may have also put a little bit of money on Gausman to win the award before the season began so I may be pushing my agenda a tiny bit, but in all seriousness the guy has been an elite pitcher for the Blue Jays this year and there is no one I’d rather have starting a big game than Kevin.

Rookie of the Year

Josh Jung (+120 odds, p[win] = 45.5%) is starting for the AL in the upcoming All-Star Game, so he’ll likely win the award unless he falls apart or a different rookie has a huge second half.

The more exciting Rookie of the Year race is in the NL.

NL 🦅 

MVP

The MVP race isn’t very close in the National League either. Atlanta Braves superstar Ronald Acuna Jr. (-330 odds, p[win] = 76.7%) is putting up historic numbers for baseball’s top team this season.

Between Acuna and Ohtani, we are seeing some all-time great individual seasons in 2023. Not often do we see both MVP awards essentially locked up before the All-Star Game has been played 🔒️ 

Cy Young Award

Tbh most of the baseball I’ve watched this season has been the AL/Blue Jays so I haven’t seen any of these boys pitch very much in 2023.

That said, based on what I do know I think Gallen is rightfully the favorite as he leads the NL in fWAR (3.7), is 7th in ERA (3.04), is 4th in strikeouts (125), and is tied for 1st in wins with 11.

He also just looks like a sick guy, not many can rock the sports goggles like he can.

Stud.

Rookie of the Year

Now this is probably the most exciting award race in baseball.

Corbin Carroll is the heavy favorite at -300, but the guy with the second shortest odds is none other than the electric Elly De La Cruz (El(ly)ectric… should we ™️ that?), who has become a household name among baseball fans after only a month in the majors.

Check out what Elly pulled off this weekend:

So so so fun to watch.

Not only has Elly been must-see TV, but the Reds have a 22-7 record since his call-up.

Now don’t get me wrong, all of this Elly for Rookie of the Year hype wreaks of recency bias as Carroll has played at a near-MVP level for the Diamondbacks all season. If Carroll continues to play the way he has and leads the Diamondbacks to a division title for the first time since 2011, he should win the award. But if Elly is a walking highlight of the night for the remainder of the season, things will sure get interesting.

That’ll do it for our MLB mid-szn review!

I hope everyone enjoyed reading📕, getting to see my nerdier side🤓, and the design changes that we have made in The Nosebleeds🩸 

(and happy birthday Dad 🥳)

‘til next time 🫂