Keep It In Your Pants, Folks

Your wallet, your wallet! What did you think I was talking about here? Get your minds out of the gutter.

Today's simple lesson - never bet on baseball.

Levale Speigner vs. Johan Santana? A lock, for sure. Except the Nats won.

Luis Atilano vs. Tim Lincecum? Easy call on that one. I didn't bet (I don't bet on baseball) but I didn't even try to stay up. Went to bed before 10. The Nats won.

But my education goes back a long way before those games and this was the game that cemented it for me.

I had a colleague who bet baseball pretty heavily and, generally, pretty well. He kept all kinds of complicated charts. Haven't worked with him in 30 years but my guess is he's into the sabermetrics now.

We had a talk one day about baseball being too unpredictable for me to bet on with any confidence and he pointed out all the ways his charts helped (and mentioned all the money he made).

I told him he could pick any game he wanted. No matter how big a mismatch on paper, I'd take the non-favored side at 2-1 odds. Any game.

He picked the one I linked to above. Ron Guidry won 25 of 28 decisions that year. His ERA was under 2. Who the heck is and was Mike Willis? As bad a mismatch as you could want, it seemed.

So of course Guidry was knocked out in 1.2 innings and the Blue Jays (only two years old, I think) won the game 8-1. Willis went the distance.

That's why they play them. Keep it in your pants and expect the unexpected.

New poll coming tomorrow.