Offensive Decline of the 2005 MLB Baseball Season

by: Proloy Bhattacharyya

Offensive Decline of the 2005 MLB Baseball Season By Proloy Bhattacharyya NFLSystems.com proloy@nflsystems.com September 9, 2005 As of today, total runs scored per game are down 0.52 runs a game. Most people attribute this considerable drop in offensive production to the new steroids policies. We are entering a new era where pitching dominates and this will have a serious impact on baseball betting for the next couple of years. Relying too much on past trends and systems of even a year ago will hurt even the astute bettor unless they take into account some of the new trends and angles that we have seen this season. The most striking statistic is that a larger number of games are resulting in shutouts. 11.1% of the games played to date have resulted in a shutout as opposed to an average of 9.68% over the past several years. This means that pitchers are more dominant than ever before. We can no longer “expect” those miraculous 3 run HRs to help our game easily sail over the total. In fact, we would expect a larger number of unders now. Historically, over/unders rarely dip below 7. They would be 6.5 only when two potential National League CY Young award winners are facing off. If two great pitchers were facing off in an American League stadium then the over/under would rarely dip below 7.5. Therefore, any bet on the over deserves a second look. Another item to note is a team’s performance after a shutout loss. These teams are 128-104 +24 units this season. We have all heard the saying “save some offense for tomorrow”, well, going against teams off an outing where they scored greater than 10 runs is 117-95 +27 units this season. Going for teams off a bad hitting performance or against a team off a good hitting performance has proven to be extremely profitable this season! Although these could be aberrations, it is important to note current trends in the MLB when analyzing a game that one wants to bet on.

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