Opening day is right around the corner. There is a full season of baseball ahead, and the excitement level is at an all-time high. First pitches have not yet been thrown and possibilities are endless. Let’s delve through the players who are poised to have truly gigantic years. These are Max Smotritskiy’s MLB betting picks for MVP futures.
MLB Odds + Betting Picks: AL & NL MVP Futures
American League Favorite: Mike Trout +225
Trout is the perennial MVP, and when looking at his projections, it is tough to imagine him not winning the award again. Betting a favorite in this case is not always the best idea, as odds are short and baseball is a very volatile sport. However, Trout is indeed the favorite to bet. In the shortened season last year, Trout did everything just as well as he always has done. His strikeout and walk rates were a few percentage points off his other MVP seasons, but otherwise the rest of the numbers were almost identical. He also started hitting more fly balls, which will in turn lead to a lower batting average but more home runs, and that can only be a positive for his overall numbers.
American League Sleeper: Giancarlo Stanton +4000
Stanton has been injury prone in his several years, but that does not limit his upside — it just increases his volatility of outcomes. That is exactly why he is +4000, and in betting futures the goal is to embrace such ranges of outcome. The underlying statistics show that Stanton absolutely smashed when healthy. Last year his xISO of .231, xwOBA of .412 and barrel rate of 18.4% all suggest elite projections over a course of a full season. Yankee Stadium, his home park, is also an elite hitters park, especially when it gets hot and humid in the dog days of summer. Given some good luck with injuries, Stanton is a great dark-horse MVP candidate in 2021.
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National League Favorite: Juan Soto +850
Soto has become a fearsome hitter in a very short period of time. At only 22 years of age, he led the league in most predictive offensive categories last year. He was third in xBA, first in xSLG, first in xwOBA and first in xISO. His dramatic improvement in making contact — reducing his strikeout rate by a full 6 points last year — has led to a batting profile unmatched by anyone not named Mike Trout.
National League Sleeper: Christian Yelich +1500
Yelich should not really be a sleeper except for how unlucky he was in the COVID-shortened season last year. His BABIP was almost 100 points lower than his average. His hard hits were down but not drastically so, and it seems like he got in a slump due to poor batted-ball luck, and he never got out of it in the short season. He hit more ground balls last year, but that is not a real concern for a player that pays attention to his launch angle and can go back to what he was doing previously in a blink of an eye. Stats point to the fact that he can bounce back from last year quite well and provide a nice MVP sweat at longer odds than most comparable favorites.
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