Baseball Betting: The Elusive Four-Game Road Sweep
It is extremely rare for a road team to sweep a four-game series. An individual once mentioned that he was picking a home team X in Game 4 of the series after losing the first three games because he felt that there was no way that team would get swept in a 4 game series.
This sounds like one of the gamblers fallacies. For example, the odds that a fair coin lands on heads 10 consecutive times is 1/1024. People know that it is unlikely for a coin to land on heads 10 consecutive times so when they see a coin landing on heads 9 consecutive times, the novice (naïve) gambler would bet a lot of money on tails citing that the law of averages indicates more tails will come. With coins, each flip is an independent and isolated event from any other flip. The fact that 9 heads came up in a row has absolutely no bearing on the outcome of the 10th flip.
Baseball can be different because we are dealing with human beings. Losing 3 games in a row at home can be a strong motivating factor to play your hardest in the 4th game so that you are not swept, etc.
Looking at the data, what I uncovered was startling. Road Teams looking for a sweep in the fourth game of a series is 57-45, +8.4 Units over the past 7 seasons. This indicates that this road team has about 8 points of value. It makes sense because we would expect the home team to get extra betting action because of all the people out there trying to bet the “law of averages”.
Analyzing it further, I noticed that our team plays better in Game #4 if the two teams are division rivals and this leads to a 34-23 record, +11.0 Units. The possible explanation for that would be the fact that in order to win 4 games in a row on the road you would need to have a killer instinct and that it is far easier to have the killer instinct against a division rival than a non-division rival.
Nevertheless, my advice is to never follow the public on generalities such as these. Whenever you find yourself trying to bet the “law of averages”, you most certainly will get taken. A classic example of this was the fact that in the Pistons-Lakers championship series a couple of years ago, the prevailing statistic was that no team had ever won all 3 home games in a row in the 2-3-2 format. A good buddy of mine bet large on the Lakers each of those 3 games only to lose.
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