Tampa Bay, 5.85:1 (5Dimes)
Current Record: 84-53
PECOTA Playoff Odds: 99.4%I stopped paying attention, but apparently Jason Hammel totally fell apart in the ninth against the Yankees tonight, and Maddon had to bring in Dan Wheeler for the one-out "K-Rod save". They won, at least.

Sportsbook's attempts to limit their exposure to certain events on these futures/props are very amusing. After having the Rays at 100:1 more...

(You have less than two hours to join the NFL Totals Contest. If I don't receive your entry and tiebreaker by 5pm EST, you're not in. I'll post the picks of both MoneyLine and myself shortly after the deadline.)

The good folks at Football Outsiders have released updated win projections, along with their DVOA projections. Since DVOA adjusts for schedule, we can now take the SOS disclaimer out of more...

The PFP numbers are from here, and the Vegas numbers are the over/unders from Pinnacle, adjusted to incorporate the juice. The third column is the formula I came up with, explained here. I am not sure what the rounded numbers add up to, but the unrounded numbers average out to 8 for each column in my Excel spreadsheet. more...

We ended up with around 180 entries; I'm not sure of the exact number, since I haven't inputted them into Excel yet. At the beginning of next week there will be a "who picked whom" post.

My picks are: Patriots U, Ravens O, Texans O, Raiders U, Eagles O, Lions U, Bucs O, Seahawks O, and 3,121 yards for Anderson. more...

Trust me, I want to stop advertising this unreliable, immoral site. But that's just not an option when they put out lines like this:

The Cubs are currently 4.5 games up on the Brewers; according to CoolStandings, they have a--.2% chance of winning the Wild Card. BPro hasn't updated their odds today, but they had it at 15.1% yesterday, before both Chicago and Milwaukee lost last night. 25:1 is break even at 3.846%. You do the math. more...

Way back in April, Sportsbook posted Week 1 lines. Let's see what's changed since (current lines from Pinnacle):
Very little, really; only three moves of more than one point. Interesting to note that despite their recent transaction, the Jets' line has not changed.
The most popular dog, by far, is the Vikings, drawing more...

(See last week's post for a description of what is going on here.)

This requires a bit of a leap of faith, but that Eagles price at The Greek is pretty nice. It is possible, if not probable, that the Cowboys' medical staff is at least somewhat responsible for their continued success of preventing injuries, but even after we regress these to the Vegas lines, the Eagles come out looking pretty good. more...

more...

Current prize pool: $306.83

Current top 10:Alexi T. has come back to the pack a bit, as the Orioles (11-17), A's (10-20), and Pirates (7-21) didn't have good months. Five people who didn't make the list are on pace for 8 (+/- in parenthesis): Tonyo33 (+57.9), Josh W. (+52.4), McHale (+48.6), Alex L. (+40.5), and JT16 (+36.8). more...

(As you probably know, I'm aware that wins are a pretty poor indicator of a pitcher's actual performance. That's fine. What follows is not an argument that Cliff Lee v. 2008, just some numbers I found to be pretty incredible.)

Best single-season winning percentages ever (min. 20 decisions):

Pretty impressive, although it'll be tough to stay above the .900 mark in his last five starts. What is really amazing is that last column. Not surprisingly, most of these teams are really good. The average team W% for #2-#10 is .622. I went looking for the highest winning percentage on a sub-.500 team. This took awhile, as I had to go all the way down to #87 on more...

Extra Mustard column: NFC totals.

Grady Sizemore joins the 30-30 club. The Indians have not lost recently.

Sadly, the video of the taekwondo incident at the Olympics was taken down very quickly. At least we will always have this picture.

Gotta love when you quote an unnamed scout and he makes no sense more...

Tampa Bay, 6.5:1 (VIP)
Current Record: 80-51
PECOTA Playoff Odds: 98.2%

The odds at 5Dimes may still be better than this, but they're not up right now.

The Rays are on pace to allow 644 runs. They allowed 944 last year. Unreal.

Unless the Yankees get incredibly hot, the only realistic* way the Rays could miss the playoffs is if the Red Sox, White Sox, and Twins all pass them in the standings. They are currently four games up on Boston, five ahead of Chicago, and six in front of Minnesota. Each of those teams have played two fewer games than Tampa; their loss column leads are five, six, and seven, respectively. more...

I was just looking at this weekend's college football lines at BetUS. I happened to not be logged in to my account at the time. A sampling:

Pretty good prices, at least as of about 8:30 EST on Tuesday night. Juicy dog lines are pretty typical at BetUS. But then I logged in:Wow, those changed quickly! more...

BetUS has posted odds on which team will win the Wild Card. Those are listed in the first numerical column below. The second column is what the odds should be, at least according to Baseball Prospectus' Postseason Odds.We clearly have a disagreement of Boston's chances of winning the Wild Card.A quick look at the current standings shows that the Red Sox currently have a 1.5 game lead on the Twins for the WC. The White Sox also come into the picture, since they're only a game up on Minnesota in the Central. So, the standings among those three teams look like this: more...

On Willy Aybar. As opposed to the guy who threw an elbow at him. Unbelievable. more...