“Should we be live betting Aaron Judge walks?”
That message popped up in my betting group chats as the New York Yankees were visiting the Toronto Blue Jays, but more importantly, as Judge was chasing home run No. 61.
The thought process made so much sense: Aaron Judge was on the verge of tying Roger Maris for the American League home run record. No pitcher — or team for that matter — would want to be the one to serve up No. 61 or 62.
As it turns out, we definitely should have been live betting Judge to walk. I caught onto the trend a bit late, but those who were on it from the start had an incredibly profitable week.
Judge hit his 60th home run in the bottom of the ninth against the Pittsburgh Pirates on September 20. He hit No. 61 in the top of the seventh against the Toronto Blue Jays on September 28.
Between those two home runs, Judge walked 13 times in 34 plate appearances. Using +400 as average odds, bettors would have profited roughly 31 units simply by blindly betting a walk during each Judge at-bat.
Simply put: If you had bet $100 on each of those at-bats, you would have profited $3,100 at those odds.
A walk in the park for bettors
Joe Caputo, a lead MLB trader at FanDuel Sportsbook, said that wagering on Judge to walk was a trend that really took off during the Yankees-Blue Jays series.
“It wasn’t right after he hit his 60th. It took a few games but then it really started to pick up when they played the Blue Jays series,” Caputo said in an exclusive interview with Covers. “There was one game in Toronto where Judge walked four times. And then I guess word kind of got out there and action really picked up towards the end of the Jays series and into the next series against the Orioles.”
This wasn’t just sharp or professional bettors taking advantage of a unique market situation. FanDuel saw “all kinds of action from every which way.”
“I can’t give you exact figures, but between home runs 60 and 62 we did lose money on the walk option,” Caputo admitted. “We lost quite a bit.”
Setting odds on the record chase
Caputo mentioned that before the record chase, a typical Judge at-bat would see the slugger priced between +500 and +700 for a walk. During the record chase, the odds on a walk opened at about +450 for most at-bats but was quickly bet down to around +400 or even +350.
“Our in-play model is derived from historical data and is not designed to go that low on a walk, but traders have the ability to override it in special instances,” Caputo explained. “We got to a point where we did feel there was a material change. We were actually probably a little late on the move.”
That material change came on Saturday, October 1, when the Baltimore Orioles were visiting the Yankees. Caputo was working that day and made the decision to drastically shorten the odds, even going as low as even money, or +100, during one at-bat.
“We had taken a lot of action on the walk up to that point. And yeah, we made a decision on Saturday to start steering into it and shortening the price quite a bit,” he said. “We got down to close to pick’em [+100] on the walk at that point. We were trimming the walk price while also giving careful consideration to which selections of the live market to make bigger. That added an extra layer to our conundrum.”
A massive in-play market
For an in-play baseball market, the Judge at-bats were as big as it gets. As a company policy, FanDuel does not reveal numbers publicly, but Caputo used another star player as a comparison to illustrate how much money was being bet on Judge's at-bats.
“At the peak, the handle on Judge at-bats was close to 50 times more than the handle on a Shohei Ohtani at-bat,” he said. “On average [during the record chase], Judge was taking 10-15 times more handle than Ohtani.”
Bear in mind that Ohtani was second at the time in AL MVP odds and was making a historic push of his own to win his second consecutive Most Valuable Player trophy. His at-bats — and pitching appearances — were widely considered must-see TV by most fans.
Even more impressive is the fact that all of that handle came without any action in New York, as state regulations do not permit live betting on micro markets such as the result of the next at-bat. The regulated New York sports betting market is the largest in the U.S. and took in $1.25 billion in bets in September alone.
“You can only imagine how much bigger the handle would have been if it were allowed in New York,” Caputo added.
Pricing Judge in the playoffs
The Yankees will start their 2022 postseason run on Tuesday night as they take on the Cleveland Guardians in the American League Division Series. With the AL record chase in the rearview mirror, it will be interesting to see how bettors respond to the Judge at-bat markets.
FanDuel will undoubtedly be monitoring the market closely, and Caputo has an idea of how his team will be pricing the walks.
“Was it a strategic thing to walk Judge or was it that the pitcher didn’t want to give up the 61st or 62nd home run?” Caputo said about the thought process that goes into shaping Judge’s at-bat markets during the playoffs. “I think we’ll probably err a little bit on the side of caution and we may offer it a bit shorter than we did before all this madness in September. We won’t be offering it at +150 or whatever we got down to last week, but it will be in the back of our minds for sure.”
One thing is for certain, the eyes of the world will be on Judge as he tries to make a little more history with every swing of his bat in the postseason.
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