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It is nice to be back after taking most of the summer off. Today we have Jon Lester vs Bruce Chen.
For a little pregame discussion, I will try to look at the Vegas odds for the game. I have been trying to figure out some of the guts behind the predictions. For tonight's game the odds are:
Boston: -114
Kansas City: +104
It will take a $114 bet with Boston to win $100 (negative line) and a $100 bet with KC will win a person $104 (positive value). The expected winning % using the two odds is Boston at 52.1%. Seems about right.
Now, just taking the teams winning percentage of .603 for Boston and .523 for Kansas City. These values put Boston's winning % for the game at 58.1% if played at a neutral site. Home teams have a 4% edge, so the chance drops to 53.4% for Boston winning in KC.
Now taking their Pythagorean winning percentages of .549 for Boston and .5103 for Kansas City, Boston would expect to win 53.8% of the time at a neutral site. With the game at KC, Boston winning percentage drops to .496.
It seems like Boston is getting a little boost for having Lester start instead of Chen (duh), but otherwise everything else seems to fall in line. Thoughts.