Believe it or not, the MLB season is approaching fast! Teams will start reporting on February 14th, and games will begin on February 22nd! The Padres and Dodgers get started a little earlier as they start the season in Seoul, South Korea On March 20th and 21st. Opening Day for the rest of the league is on March 28th.
With that mind, it’s a great time to start looking at season win totals. Win Totals are a great way to be engaged throughout the entire season. You’re rooting for the team you bet on to win more or less games than the number posted. Let’s say you bet on the Astros to have Over 92.5 wins on the year. That means they need to win 93 or more games for your bet to win. It’s no different than betting on an over/under for an individual game. It doesn’t matter how many games they go over this total. As long as they win 93 games, you’re good!
With that in mind, let’s take a look at two teams who have win totals that seem ripe for exploiting!
New York Mets Over 82.5 Wins
The Mets came into last year with the highest payroll in the history of the sport. What followed may have been the single biggest disaster of a season in MLB history. The high-priced free agents and team never matched expectations, they sold players off at the deadline, and stumbled their way to 75 wins. However, there’s reasons for optimism this year. The team has a new GM in David Stearns and new manager in Carlos Mendoza. Most of the lineup is returning from last year. The team signed ancillary pieces throughout the offseason, primarily for the bullpen. The team will also get back star closer Edwin Diaz, who never pitched for the team last year after blowing out his knee in the World Baseball Classic. The way the Mets increase their win total will be primarily from a better bullpen. By just about every available metric, the Mets had one of the worst bullpens in the league last year. Their starting pitching staff is also younger, which can be beneficial in a long season. If the Mets can steal some wins against the two top teams in the division, that’ll also be very helpful. They were a respectable 6-7 against the Phillies but 3-10 against the Braves. Holding serve against these two juggernauts will go a long way to the Mets having a season they can be proud in!
However, there’s also teams in the division they should beat up on, which leads us to…
Miami Marlins Under 78.5 Wins
By many metrics last year, the Marlins overperformed for large portions of the season. They had arguably the worst offense to ever make the playoffs! They had the single lowest run differential for a playoff team in MLB history. What does this mean? It means they won a lot of close games last year, and when they lost, the games weren’t particularly competitive. Yes, as the adage goes, good teams find a way to win and bad teams find a way to lose. However, it’s hard to win so many close games year after year. The Marlins were also just 26-26 against their division last year, which is respectable enough given the Braves and Phillies. However, the Mets can’t be worse than they were last year and it won’t take a lot for the Nationals to be better as well, given they only won 70 games last year. It’s true former Cy Young Winner Sandy Alcantara didn’t have a good year last year, the Marlins received solid contributions from many other players. Given they had a historic playoff appearance and still only managed to get 84 wins on the year, it wouldn’t take a whole lot for them to lose 6 more games this year than they did last year. If their offense doesn’t improve this year, they could lose a whole lot more games than that.
The MLB season is starting soon, and there will be plenty of content coming on how to make the 2024 MLB Season a profitable!