Vegas Loves These Pitchers

This blog entry was inspired by a discussion at The Book Blog regarding how often the Phillies were the favorite team to win in Vegas when Roy Halladay was pitching based on an arbitrary opponent. I took it a step further and looked at the actual empirical data from the 2011 season. Then I took things another step further and looked at a few other pitchers of interest. Below are the results.

Pitcher	GS	Favored	Underdog	Fave %	Max	Min	Average	Actual Win%
Roy Halladay	17	17	0	100.00	70.59	51.22	63.85	82.35
C.C. Sabathia	17	17	0	100.00	67.21	52.49	61.09	70.59
Jon Lester	16	16	0	100.00	69.42	51.1	60.79	56.25
Cliff Lee	17	17	0	100.00	69.7	51.1	60.34	64.71
Justin Verlander	17	15	2	88.24	65.81	41.49	57.09	64.71
Cole Hamels	16	14	2	87.50	68.75	47.28	59.57	68.75
Tommy Hanson	16	14	2	87.50	69.23	48.19	58.1	62.5
Tim Lincecum	16	14	2	87.50	65.64	48.43	57.94	62.5
Jered Weaver	18	15	3	83.33	64.85	47.85	56.36	61.11
Jair Jurrjens	14	11	3	78.57	62.26	42.19	53.82	71.43
Clayton Kershaw	17	12	5	70.59	65.22	45.35	53.99	58.82
Josh Beckett	15	10	5	66.67	67.74	37.74	55.43	66.67
Ian Kennedy	17	11	6	64.71	63.17	35.4	50.88	64.71
James Shields	16	10	6	62.50	64.09	41.41	53.51	75
Anibal Sanchez	16	10	6	62.50	61.39	35.65	51.38	50
Ricky Romero	18	11	7	61.11	60.24	37.38	50.15	38.89