Josh Hamilton is on his way to a career year with a monster month of May that has him on top of nearly every offensive category in baseball right now. Will all that add up to a Triple Crown?
Well, it’s time to start thinking about it.
There aren’t any odds on Hamilton’s chances for the triple crown just yet, but they will come soon. And when MLB Betting Odds start diving into those waters, Covers’ writer Jeff Haney thinks he knows what his chances will be.
“My calculations,” he wrote in a recent blog, “give Hamilton approximately a 20 percent chance of winning the AL Triple Crown.
“A no-vigorish line at that price would read -400 on ‘no,’ Hamilton will not win the Triple Crown, and +400 that he will.
“A line in a sports book would read something like -475 on the ‘no,’ +325 on the ‘yes,’ assuming a theoretical hold rate of 5.8 percent.”
That’s all jumbo, but the bottom line is Hamilton’s odds are low to win the crown, but still good considering were just two months into the season.
One thing in Hamilton’s favor is he hits in a lineup that scores a lot of runs and will always have men on base. As of Thursday, Hamilton leads the home run category by five, the RBI category by 11 and his .404 batting average is 38 points higher than Derek Jeter’s. No one is really nipping on his heels.
When you’re looking for signs to whether someone can finish a historic season, you look for two things: How is his competition playing in comparison, and is he doing the supernatural. To win the Triple Crown, he’ll need to have a freakish season combined with marginal efforts from the rest of the league.
“There’s an element of subjectivity in estimating his, or any player’s, plate appearances-to-home run ratio the rest of the way,” Haney writes. “You don’t want to simply extrapolate his current numbers over 162 games, though. That would yield something like 80 homers and 200 RBIs. Not even Ducky Medwick could maintain that pace.
“Next, estimate the odds of his rivals overtaking Hamilton in the three key categories. Hint: Excel is your friend. For example, I consider Curtis Granderson the biggest threat to Hamilton’s Triple Crown run, with about a 30 percent chance of beating Hamilton for the home run title.”
You can check off the freakish season category after he drilled four home runs in one game two weeks ago, just the ninth MLB player to do so. He followed it up with two more the next night. He’s hitting home runs at a crazy pace, and it seems all he has to do is stay on the field.
I’m not all that interested in telling bettors precisely what I would do because betting is really kind of a personal gut thing. But when odds come out soon, he will have a pretty good line to win the crown with so much early momentum. Only one of two things will happen after that: either he will keep his crazy pace, and the lines will shorten, or someone like Miguel Cabrera will have a big month and scare bettors away. I don’t think there’s a better time to jump on him than now, if you’re into that kind of prop betting.