I recently had a friend travel to Las Vegas for work and naturally, I gave him money to put down a parlay bet for me. This was my first and only real bet ever placed on a sporting event, aside from March Madness pools and fantasy sports. Like anyone who has every bet on sports, it can become a very addicting kryptonite for some and I was no different. I sat glued to the Kansas/Kansas State game hoping any shot would result in points and that Kansas would score about 150 points just to make sure my bet was safe. In reality, that didn’t happen. I lost.
Mandatory Credit: Ron Chenoy-USA TODAY Sports
Kansas couldn’t beat Kansas State so my Kansas by -3.5 points ruined my parlay with the over of 136.5 total points, oh well. Now I can say I have bet on a sporting event in Vegas and have only limited it to that one bet…so far (sincerely, your future ex-gambling addict amateur sports blogger). This bet did get me thinking about betting in sports and how much of a science it has become. Having heard from a few people about their bets on over/under Twins regular season wins for last year, it got me thinking about what will actually happen in the win column in 2014 for our Twinkines.
How many games will the Twins win this year?
Will it be higher than last year given the new additions to the team?
Will Vegas have us projected higher than last year’s over/under of 67 wins?
Will we hopefully have more wins than the Astros this year?! Oh, please let it be more than the Astros!!!
This thought transpired into me sitting down and looking over the projected lineup for 2014 for some time to try and come up with my own “Vegas” like line on wins for this upcoming season. To put it in perspective, it might have been about 2 or 3 adult beverages before I was done analyzing the Twins’ lineup, starting rotation, and schedule to try and come to grips with my own magic number for an over/under regular season wins in 2014.And to be honest, my sheet of paper with these numbers looked something of the following:
67 69 66 67 69 68 67 68 69 70 68 68
The number is subjective in itself, but I always like throwing out a number going into a season to see how close I am. I was very close last year thinking they would win 65, but ultimately the Twins did exceed my expectations and surprised me. With our odds to win the World Series this year somewhere near the same as winning the lottery or being struck by lighting (sarcasm horn), I am much more interested in what our over/under line on wins in Vegas this year will be when they are released sometime next week.
As you can see in my demonstration of what I had wrote down, it was not an easy task for me to come up with a solid number. I took into consideration potential injuries, possibility of Sano being called up, effectiveness of our newly signed pitchers, Dozier picking up where he left off, Deduno being healthy all year or not, and finally came to the decision of 68 wins. My justification in only having it be two more wins from last year is our offensive production was simply not addressed this offseason in an every day starter, just players being moved around and possible platoons. While our starting staff was improved, our offense simply does not have the production to be a force in the AL Central and is why I have the number still below the 70s.
Now, I love the Twins as much as the next person but I have a hard time seeing them improving more than a couple wins. Granted, the Twins could surprise us and wind up being a dark horse in 2014 (it’s ok if you instantly thought of Katy Perry and started humming “Dark Horse” in your head).
While I have my own number, and now a super catchy song, stuck in my head regarding the Twins total number of wins this upcoming season, what do you think will be the Twins win total this year?