With Major League Baseball underway, the ScoreMetrics Lab offers a helping hand by exploring the viability of investing in some of the game’s top pitchers.

This isn’t the first time we’re talking about investing in players instead of teams. You can read what we wrote about the Los Angeles Clippers’ Kawhi Leonard as an investment case here.

For this exercise, we look at the top four starting pitchers with the most wins from last season, all playing for marquee franchises of the game. 

Houston’s Justin Verlander racked up a league-leading 21 wins in 2019 during the regular season. He was followed by his former teammate Gerrit Cole (who is throwing for the New York Yankees in 2020) with 20 W’s. Boston’s Eduardo Rodríguez had 19, while Domingo Germán got 18 for the Yankees. Germán shared the 4^th spot on the list with Zack Greinke and Stephen Strasburg.

All four players obviously had successful seasons, but would it have made sense to invest in their teams winning when they started? Keep on reading to find out. 

Small gains for the Astros duo

For this research, we backtracked what would have happened if we would’ve invested $100 on each pitcher’s team winning when they started. Let’s begin with Verlander’s case. 

Intuition might tell you that investing in the pitcher with the most wins in a season would provide value, but when we look at the table below, we see very small returns. 

Verlander’s Astros won 70.6% of the games he started, but the ROI for our investment is a measly 3% for a total of $3400 invested. Looking at the odds, you’ll see that bookmakers favored Houston in each of Verlander’s starts last season. That meant a low return for us on each of his wins, which in turn makes the investment very risky and probably not very profitable in the long run.

Gerrit Cole, Verlander’s teammate last year, had a similar looking season. The Astros were the favorite in each of his 33 starts and won 78.8% of those games. Our investment to Cole would have been $3300 and our return $392.90 (11.9% ROI). Better than Verlander, but still a very low number.

Rodríguez and Germán return more value

Moving on to Boston, let’s look at how Eduardo Rodríguez fared.

That’s 33 games started and Boston winning 75.8% of them. Our $3300 investment has a 26% ROI. So, Cole had a higher winning percentage, but Rodríguez would’ve still returned over twice the amount that we got for Cole in the same amount of games. The reason is easy to spot – the Red Sox were underdogs in some of the games they won, providing us with higher returns.

Finally, how about Domingo Germán? 

He started the fewest amount of games out of the pack at 24 starts, but the investment would have been by far the best at a 38.7% ROI for $2400 invested. That’s starting to look pretty decent. 

Risky returns

So, what should we make of this data? 

The investment cases for the Astros duo were clearly weak. Bad odds equaled into small gains with a high risk. 

The ones for Rodríguez and Germán looked much more enticing. But swing a couple of the close games where they were underdogs the other way and the returns take significant hits. 

In short, the ScoreMetrics Lab would not recommend these investments based on this research. But the data does point us to some potentially interesting directions and further avenues for research. 

What if we look at the pitchers with most wins from the last 10 years, would that give us solid evidence to back an investment? How about including ATS and O/U performances, is there something there? Or maybe the best gains just don’t come from the most famous of pitchers and ball clubs?

Certainly a topic to keep an eye on throughout the season!

ScoreMetrics Lab

The ScoreMetrics Lab is the engine that runs the Sports Trading System operation, consisting of a team of researchers and writers who are constantly testing and retesting algorithms. They work hand in hand with our Head Trader and Creator of ScoreMetrics, John Todora to help find new breakthroughs and develop new systems.