The Series: BOS +157 vs TBR -187
The Play: None. yet.
The Breakdown:
Run Scoring: I was tempted to just forego this whole preview and just send a big shrug emoji. The BOS bats are better than the TBR bats, but at the most it’s 5% and at the worst, it’s even. I truly can’t put a number on TBR’s expected offensive output either due to all their lineup configurations. Overall, TBR is such an advanced handicap, that I’ve played them very little all season and really can’t get a feel for modelling them still. I think the bats are even on a true talent level; BOS has a stars/scrubs type advantage and TBR has a depth/platoon advantage.
Run Prevention: TBR is elite here. Their arms are great from top to bottom and their defense is strong. Overall, Boston is not those things. My problem is quantifying this edge to get to a -200 type play on TBR for the series. TBR would need to be an average line of -150 across the 5 games to justify the -200 for the series. In Game 1, they have a pretty serious starting pitcher advantage and are only -160. BOS has Houck, Eovaldi and Sale still to come and I have each of them rated better than E-Rod. TBR has Baz, and ???? as the projected starters and I think they’re all either as good or worse than McClanahan. So I can’t justify a series play here unless the pen and defense advantage is pretty significant. And it’s pretty close to significant. The TBR pen vs the BOS pen is a huge advantage. So much so that it (along with the defense) might justify the price if I could do that math competently. Since I’m not doing that, I’ll probably look to in-game TBR if it’s tied or if BOS leads after 5. TBR should have a significant advantage after the starters are out, so playing into that could have value.
Managers: Both these guys do pretty well. I’ll take Cash over Cora, but it’s tough to separate how much of that is personnel vs usage of that personnel. I think Cash is a slight edge to TBR though.
Umpires: Kulpa (G4) and Knight (G6?) are top 25% in erroring towards strikes, Gibson (G5?) and Bellino (G1) are top 25% in erroring towards balls.
Other than the in-game angle, I don’t see much that I have in mind for this series.
Exact Prediction: Purely guessing. TBR in 3.