It seems to be a common theme in this year's postseason that the perceived better team gets its odds inflated. I wrote about this for the Chicago Cubs in the wild-card game and for both the Astros and Brewers in their respective Division Series. Once again, this appears to be the case for the Red Sox and Yankees.
The Sox finished with a better record, won the division and didn't have to win a wild-card game just to be here. But should that make them a 60 percent favorite to win this series, as Vegas implies? I'm not convinced.
Here is my betting preview for the series:
Boston Red Sox (-150) vs. New York Yankees (+130)
Game 1 odds: Yankees (Happ) +165 at Red Sox (Sale) -180
Game 1 over/under: 8 (U -120)
During the regular season, Boston played New York 19 times and won 10 of the matchups (53 percent). Despite the Red Sox finishing eight games ahead of the Yankees in the standings, Baseball Prospectus calculates that number would have been cut nearly in half if records were based solely on run differential -- a truer indicator of performance than actual wins. If you were take run differential a step further
None of this is necessarily predictive, but it does show that there are a lot of ways in which the Red Sox and Yankees have a much narrower talent gap than the Vegas odds indicate. Plus, New York added a top-25 hitter in baseball in August (Andrew McCutchen) who would have boosted its numbers further if he had been around all year. When we run the actual individualized math, we see that the matchups in this series may actually tend to favor the Yankees -- or at least portend a close split. I see this playing out similarly to how I described the Milwaukee-Colorado series. Each team will be a pretty big favorite in each of its home games (with the exception of Game 2 here), which makes it almost impossible to call one team or the other a big favorite for the series.
Here's why I like the matchups for the Yankees: This is a team built around power, specifically right-handed power. Boston's two best pitchers, Chris Sale and David Price, are both left-handed, which means the entire Yankees order (excepting Didi Gregorius) will hold the platoon advantage against them.
The Yankees will have a hard time beating Boston in Games 1 and 5 given that Sale is the best pitcher in baseball, but he is a lefty with a wider split than average, which would at least give New York a fighting chance given its lineup construction. In Game 2 against the southpaw Price, with a superior pitcher in Tanaka going for New York, it should be something close to a pick 'em.
Game 3 should be all Yankees, as this is when we're most likely to see Luis Severino reappear after he dominated in the wild-card game. The game also will be in New York, in the most homer-friendly park in baseball, which feeds right into the Yankees' strengths. They'll face Rick Porcello in Game 3 and Nate Eovaldi in Game 4, both of whom are right-handers, but they are right-handers who have exhibited homer problems the past two seasons and who actually have slightly reverse true talent platoon splits in this regard -- i.e., they project to give up slightly more power to right-handers. I have New York as a 67 percent favorite in Game 3, and a 57 percent favorite in Game 4. Part of being a favorite in Game 4 is also because Lance Lynn will probably take the mound in that game. Unlike Porcello and Eovaldi, Lynn is a righty with a very wide platoon split. That means a very strong advantage against nearly all of Boston's best hitters.
I see Game 1 going to Boston, but as with Milwaukee, it has been handicapped so well as to make betting either side a -EV (negative expected value) proposition.
In terms of the series as a whole, I said it with the Brewers and I'll say it for Boston: Mathematically, a team simply can't be a 60 percent favorite to win a series when it is a huge underdog in one game, a decent underdog in another, and a toss-up in a third. The Yankees were a favorite to win the division in April, and that talent didn't just go away; if anything, they added to it. Their projection is heavily influenced by low-occurrence events (namely, home runs), so there's wide variance here with the obvious chance for the power to be missing for a couple of games. But if we were to play this series out a million times, I might even go as far as calling New York a small favorite. Either way, I just don't see Boston as the overwhelming winner here, which means I'm taking the Bronx Bombers to prevail.
Pick: Yankees +130 for the series (no bet for Game 1)