The Underrated Mets

I was poking my way around the odds from Ladbrokes just now (mainly to see who they had favored to win the Honda Classic, the answer to which is Tiger Woods) when I noticed that the New York Mets are given just 100/1 odds of winning the World Series. That sounded a bit low, compared to the Baseball Prospectus odds I referenced in this earlier post. Turns out it's not that low; 100/1, obviously, projects to a roughly 1% chance of winning, while BP has the Mets at a 1.4% chance of winning it all. But the projections about the Mets odds of winning their division are another story. Ladbrokes puts them at 20/1. That implies roughly 5% chances of winning. They've got the Washington Nationals favored at 1/1, i.e. a 50% chance, followed by the Atlanta Braves at 23/10, roughly 30%; the Philadelphia Phillies at 27/10, roughly 27%; the 20-1 Mets; and the 50-1 Florida Marlins, circa 2%. Now, that adds up to about 114%, with the extra 14% obviously accounting for Ladbrokes' profits, so one would need to scale everything down a little bit to get real projected odds from this. But one can still see where they're relatively bearish or bullish compared to the BP odds. Answer: bearish on the Mets, bullish on the others.

Specifically, BP gives the Nationals a 52.1% chance of winning the NL East. That's roughly in line with the Ladbrokes odds, though given the scaling adjustment it means the bookies are slightly pessimistic about the Nationals. The Braves, though, are given just a 19.5% chance, and the Phillies just 14.7%. Between the two teams, the betting community is overrating by nearly 23%! They've got the Phillies with nearly twice the odds of winning that BP has, and the Braves with 150% of the Prospectus projection. BP Puts the Marlins at 0.7% chance to take the division, again quite a bit less than the 2% implied by the 50-1 odds. And then there's the Mets, who take home the remaining 13% of the Prospectus forecast, which does actually have to add up to 100%. Bettors, then, appear to be underrating the Mets. A lot. Like, by a 13:5 ratio, or actually by a bit more than that. Now, this is all conditional on our believing BP's projections reasonable, but they're not the only projection system that doesn't hate the Mets as much as the conventional wisdom does.

The moral of the story is, if for some reason you're interested in placing a bet on baseball at Ladbrokes, you probably shouldn't put your money on the Mets to win it all, but taking them to win the division, at 20-1, is probably not a bad proposition.