Pitching Matchup: Joe Blanton (2-3, 3.81 ERA) vs. Randall Delgado (2-2, 6.30 ERA)
LV Money Line Open: ATL -125
LV Over / Under Open: 8.0
Let's agree not to talk about last night's game, OK?
So moving on... Sometimes there are lines posted that are so enticing you wonder what you're missing. I've found that most of the time if the line seems too good to be true, it probably is. Vegas doesn't make its money by posting inefficient lines, so if the line seems grossly off to you then you are the one who is likely wrong. As you can see above, the simulation has the Braves winning nearly 60% of the time, which equates to a money line of somewhere around ATL -145 to -150. As you can also see above, that is no where close to where the money line opened. So what gives? The short answer is Randall Delgado. His predicted line would be so far from what we've seen from him this year that you might ask to check his ID after the game if he pitches anything like the simulation predicts. Delgado has labored through all four of his starts, throwing at least 89 pitches in each game despite never making it out of the 6th inning. Needless to say it is a small sample, but he has never pitched more than 6.0 innings in his short career, and the simulation has him getting to that benchmark fairly often. Delgado has also gotten progressively worse pretty much every start in 2012, so there's that. Frankly I think the pre-season forecasts were probably too bullish on Delgado, so until the model catches up, we need to mentally adjust.
Additionally it is probably the absolute worst case scenario for Atlanta to have Delgado on the mound today. Their bullpen was busy in the 11 innings last night (crap, we agreed not to mention it, error! error!) when Hanson couldn't make it out of the 4th, so with an early afternoon game, the prospects of Delgado pulling his short-outing routine could be really bad for the Braves. So with the mental adjustment downward of Delgado's and the bullpen's lines, I can see how the money line momentum was on the Phillies side. It is difficult for me to subjectively price how big of an adjustment to make from ATL -145, so I'll defer to Vegas in saying that the 20 units downward made sense. The betting market has further reduced the line to ATL -118, which again, I can't really comment on because of some of the unknowns.
If we're expecting Delgado and the bullpen to have worse outings than the simulation predicts, then we have to logically assume the total should go up. According to the simulation, the game goes under 8.0 52.2% of the time. I'm going to again defer to Vegas on this, becuase the model puts the total closer to 7.0 than to 8.0.
If you're lucky, you ignored my irrational fear of betting against Halladay in three straight games and you cleaned up last night (seriously, I'm done) as the simulator said you would.
Go Phils!
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