Danny Follow Data Scientist

Bettor and Vegas Bias Towards Gerrit Cole

There’s no doubt that Gerrit Cole is an elite pitcher playing for a great team, the New York Yankees. He finished second in the AL Cy Young award in 2021 with a 3.23 ERA, however, Vegas bettors seemed to think that the Yankees were a better team with Cole on the mound than they really were. According to the Vegas opening moneyline consensus, the Yankees had an average win probability of 65.6% when Cole pitched in 2021 and sometimes a win probability as high as 80%. Seven times throughout the season, our model at Game Wagers found positive edge betting against the Yankees when Cole was on the mound. At first glance, it seems counterintuitive to bet against a name like Cole, so we analyzed our picks and found that our Game Wagers model had positive return against Cole.

The first thing that stands out is that the Yankees only won 53.3% of the games that Cole started in 2021 even though their opening line win probability hovered around 65%. Although surprising, these numbers alone don’t provide any information about a bettor’s net return, so we looked at the opening line for every game Cole started and calculated the return given you only took the opposing team and separately given you had only taken the Yankees.

Assuming a consistent $100 bet placed on each game, if a bettor took the opposing team facing Cole in all 30 starts, you’d come out ahead +8.5 units. On the other hand, had a bettor only taken the Yankees during all of Coles 31 starts, you’d have finished -5.2 units. Your typical sports bettor probably is not taking every single game Cole pitched, but we’d also find it surprising to know that the average sports bettor took as many as 7 games against Cole in a single season like our Game Wagers model did.

To dig deeper into whether this was a one off for an elite pitcher, we also looked into Clayton Kershaw, Max Scherzer and Jacob deGrom for their 2021 starts and found a positive return. In fact, had you taken every regular season game that these four pitchers started (including Cole), you’d have finished +4.3 units over 97 games for an ROI of 4.46% and had you taken the opposing team in all 97 games you’d have finished -8.9 units. For both Scherzer and deGrom, the evidence shows that the Vegas money was actually undervaluing their starts.

For more information about our MLB betting model, check out Game Wagers or reach out and we’ll answer any questions. With over thousands of lines of code, 100% of our picks are from an automated machine learning model and we continue to show success so far into the 2022 season. Let us help you find the edge in MLB betting.