Sunday, October 26, 2025

MAWGWTWFMVP

With the regular season over, there are two clear favorites for baseball’s American League Most Valuable Player (MVP) award according to ESPN:

  • Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees, whose odds are $-150$.
  • Cal Raleigh of the Seattle Mariners, whose odds are $+110$.

While these betting lines may be informed by an assessment of Judge’s and Raleigh’s real chances, they may also be informed by how much money people are betting on each player. Suppose all bettors have wagered on either Judge or Raleigh with the odds above. Some fraction $f$ of dollars wagered have been in favor of Judge, while $1−f$ has been wagered on Raleigh. For what fraction $f$ will the oddsmaker earn the same amount of money, regardless of which player earns the MVP award?

Let's normalize everything so that there is a total of one unit of total dollars wagered. When the Baseball Writers Association of America rightfully crowns Cal Raleigh as the AL MVP, the bookmaker will happily take the $+f$ from all the sad crybaby losers who were enthralled by everything New York Yankees. On the other hand in this case, the bookmaker would have to payout a total of $-1.1(1-f) = 1.1f - 1.1$ to the rational baseball afficianados who saw through the glitz, glamour and sour grapes of the East Coast media blitz for Judge and bet on Raleigh. So the total cashflow for the oddsmaker is $+f + 1.1f - 1.1 = 2.1f-1.1.$

On the other hand, just from a pure devil's advocacy perspective, there could be some happenstance where Raleigh could theoretically lose the AL MVP (tvu!, tvu!, tvu!, bli ayin hara!), ranging from the incompetent (the BBWAA forgot to change over its ballots from last year), to the patehtic (the geriatric writers couldn't stay up past their East Coast bedtimes to watch the pure and utter dominace of Raleigh), to any number of more nefarious, perverse chicanery. In this purely theoretical scenario, the oddsmaker would have a total payout of $-\frac{f}{1.5} = -\frac{2f}{3}$ to those delusional Judge patrons, while they would take the $+(1-f)$ from the hard-working, salt-of-the-earth, righteous Raleigh boosters. In this infinitesimally remote scenario, the total cashflow for the oddsmaker is $-\frac{2f}{3} + 1 -f = 1 - \frac{5f}{3}.$

A sober, dispassionate bookmaker would want these two cashflows to align, no matter how justified he might be in skewing it towards Raleigh's side. In this case, the only justification for having the oddsmaker set Raleigh as the underdog in this AL MVP race is because the two sides would net the same amount of positive cashflow if $$2.1f - 1.1 = 1 - \frac{5f}{3},$$ that is, $$f = \frac{2.1}{2.1 + \frac{5}{3}} = \frac{63}{113} \approx 0.55752212389\dots$$ of all bets were for Judge, for some ungodly reason.

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