Point Blank – August 8
The Seahawks are rebuilding the OL (again)…It is not who is “Registered to Vote” or who is “Likely to Vote”; come November 9 it will be “Who Actually Voted” (Welcome to the Machine, indeed)…We are going to have company on James Paxton now…The Monday MLB portfolio is not for the faint of heart…
The action is about to heat up in a major way now, Sunday’s foul-up in Canton not getting the NFL underway just yet, but now a full pre-season board ahead. That means a lot of football readers returning to the fold, and we are glad to have all of you back. Let’s hope that the off-season went well, and that the bankrolls are flush. The flow is going to be busy across many fronts now, so perhaps more than ever there can be the reminder that Patience is still the most important trait of all for the serious handicapper. You may even decide that you have the patience to bypass some of the MLB stuff I am playing tonight, which I would fully understand.
Because there is a long Monday read ahead across multiple fronts, it is time to plug the jukebox in again for some background to ease you along. As noted in the post-column threads last week there is a fitting piece concerning the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. Since a significant part of the Power Ratings we have built are about the gap in strength between the organizations, and how the ground game will flow between now and the first debate in late September, it is time to reach back for some Pink Floyd, post-Waters era in their “Momentary Lapse of Reason” tour that spanned 1987-89, with Welcome to the Machine -
Welcome my son, welcome to the machine.
Where have you been?
It's alright we know where you've been.
Think of that opening stanza over the next few weeks, in an instance in which one side of the equation does not bring the usual armaments to the battle, juxtaposed against arguably the most savvy political machine of our generation. As stated previously it is not a call on political preference from my end, but instead the cold and calculated understanding of how the game is played, which can make money for us in this cycle.
I will get to that sordid playing field in a moment, but first time to wrap up the NFC teams in the daily tour across the NFL landscape.
Item: The Seahawks are rebuilding the OL (again)…
If it only seems like a year ago the Seattle OL was being posed as a major question mark it is because it was, that issue being foremost when we previewed Seahawks 2015 here. Now here we go again, and to understand how drastic the shifting has been, let’s go to the recent depth charts -
2014 Super Bowl 2015 2016
LT Okung Okung Gilliam
LG Carpenter Britt Glowinski
C Unger Lewis* Britt
RG Sweezy Sweezy Ifedi
RT Britt Gilliam Webb
* Drew Nowak also started seven games
This is a lot of shuffling taking place for a team of an elite level. It isn’t just the changing of the names but also the positions, and Britt has to be setting some kind of NFL record by starting in three different spots in his first three seasons in the league.
To best grade the performance of the OL in 2015 you first have to understand just how good Russell Wilson is. Wilson is mobile, makes good decisions, and is one of the best QBs in the sport. Yet even with that mobility he was sacked on 8.6 percent of all drop-backs, which rated #29 across the NFL. Of course the reality was even worse than that – Wilson is credited with 103 rushing attempts for 553 yards, and while there are indeed some zone read packages in the offense, a lot of those rushing attempts were his ability to avoid a sack and turn the play into positive yardage.
Now this group literally starting all over again, with a different starter at each position. Britt is not the only one making a switch, with J’Marcus Webb starting 16 games at guard for the Raiders last year. Webb is also the only one that has more than three NFL seasons under his belt, and Ifedi is a rookie. This may not be a haphazard assortment however; the Seahawks claim to have a plan, with the group built for physical toughness in terms of establishing a power ground game. Let’s let respected OL coach Tom Cable set the tone -
“I don’t think your team is any good unless you’re good on the line of scrimmage. There’s a toughness, and mentality that comes with that. Was it a part of going out, getting this group, and putting it together; absolutely. Let’s face it, it’s like a bar fight every play in this league so if they can’t handle that, if they cower to that, if they give into that they can’t play on this team and we don’t want them. There has to be a certain mentality that comes with it, but you have to be able to do right in that manner too. That’s really what we’re working at now.”
Before you get too confident from that there is the fact that it has to be taken with a grain of salt as “CoachSpeak”, especially when the Seahawks signed free agent Jahri Evans over the weekend. Evans brings experience and savvy, including six straight Pro Bowl appearances in his resume. But the birthdate on that resume shows that he is 33, which is a big part of why the Saints released him in February. Does his being signed this late indicate some unease with the others? That is a story line to follow.
This may be a “tough” OL, but will it be at least an average one, with “good” likely out of reach this season? It matters because in the NFC West there are some difficult defensive fronts to block, and note that for as strong as the Seattle home field advantage is, both the Cardinals and Rams won in the Pacific Northwest last year.
Here is where I will put my focus – the Seahawks could easily get out of the gate 5-0 through a favorable early schedule, which could distract the markets from seeing what may be a genuine weakness. I will be watching the various chartings of this OL closely, and if they indeed show signs of struggle there could be some value situations fading Pete Carroll’s team after that soft early stretch.
Election 2016 Power Rating: Democrats -500
I am going to use Mondays as the day to keep the Election chronicles updated the next few weeks, since the rest of the days in August will be filled with NFL notions both on teams and individual pre-season games. Today there are some key issues to bring into play, directly connected to the “xFAV” models that were detailed here last Monday.
As post-convention polls come in they start getting taken more seriously when plugged into the model, and I believe it is pertinent to note why the model is running beyond the marketplace in terms of favoring the Democrats, despite the markets relying so much on those same polls. On most of our runs we are coming up with the Democrats 1.5-2 percent higher than the bottom lines of those surveys, and it does bring a key question into play – are we seeing now why the polls were so far off in 2012?
Let’s take a look at the October polling from that cycle from the major organizations. In each instance this is the last poll of the month from the particular group (some of them updated weekly) -
Politico/GWU 11/1 Tie
Fox News 10/30 Tie
CBS News/NY Times 10/28 Obama +1
Pew Research 10/28 Tie
IBD/TIPP 10/27 Obama +1
NPR 10/25 Romney +1
Associated Press 10/23 Romney +2
Monmouth 10/21 Romney +3
Washington Times 10/20 Obama +3
NBC News/Wall St Journal 10/20 Tie
Hartford Courant/UConn 10/16 Obama +3
Gallup* 10/10 Romney +1
Gallup** 10/10 Obama +2
Rasmussen 10/6 Romney +2
* -Likely Voters
** - Registered Voters
Those are not terribly accurate trackings that late in the game for something that ended up Obama +3.9. What did they miss? The prime suspect is that they did not gauge the demographics of the turnout well. From our model it looks like they may not be doing that again.
You will hear a couple of classifiers on top of polls - “Registered Voters” and “Likely Voters”. Simple enough. But the second category is not always what it appears to be – some pollsters only track folks that say that they are ”likely” to vote, in theory eliminating opinions of those that will not (which does make sense). Our model comes at this differently, and it goes back to those past demographic tables that were listed last Monday, and are a major part of the calculations. The model is projected that come November 9 “Who Will Likely Have Voted”, which is a far different classification than “Likely Voters”.
We can start with a hypothesis – did the 2012 pollsters err because they did not come close enough to the demographic breakdowns of the voters? It makes sense, and Gallup decided to get out of the “Horse Race” aspect of polling in this cycle in part because they saw flaws in their modeling. Could it be that NHW (non-Hispanic whites) got over-represented in polling, and Hispanics and African-Americans under-represented, simply because the first group is far more likely to have a land-line, and also more likely to have a cell phone? And could that be happening again?
We see this in our breakdowns because we do not look at the overall poll results, but instead go category by category within the demographics, and plug them into the model. Not all of the polls give us that, but those that do show what we believe are the same miscalculations – as a concrete example a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that did lay out the full demographics showed 72 percent NHW and 10 percent Hispanic, in recording Clinton +9. That matches the 2012 turnout, which we believe means that it is behind, especially as we re-print this shifting direction from the election cycles in this millennium –
2000 04 08 12 16
NHW 81 77 74 72 xxx
Hispanic 7 8 9 10 xxx
It matters so much in the 2016 calculations because those groups are gapped so widely between the candidates. Take NHW to 70.5 and Hispanic to 11.5, plug in their preferences, and consider how the overall count changes. Perhaps 70/12 is more likely and even that is conservative based on the most recent population shifts (we are running some models with NHW at 69 percent).
Hence why our power rating remains higher than the current market trading, and in particular note the first post-convention major polls in terms of women voters from sources that broke that sub-group down, compared to the past two cycles. Barack Obama captured women voters by +11 vs. Mitt Romney and +12 vs. John McCain, but of the polls that have showed the breakdown for women over this past week it was an identical Clinton +23 from the trio of ABC News/Washington Post, CNN/ORC and Fox News, that consistency lending a higher degree of credibility. Since women can be penciled in at 53-54 percent of the “Who Actually Voted” category, you can see how significant that increase is.
There is more here. Why do we call our model “xFAV”? Because one of the things that we saw at the start of the process was that as bad as Donald Trump’s overall favorability ratings were, that was with a model of randomly sampling U.S. citizens, and not attempting at all to estimate what the voters will likely be. As such, many of those surveys have also appeared to under-sample African Americans and Hispanics, even more than the Horse Race polling, again because they are more difficult to make contact with than other groups. By taking the favorability ratings across each sub-category when we could get the data, and adjusting to the expected voter model, it brought a prospect that Trump’s favorability numbers might be 2-3% worse than those surveys. That is ominous, because in polls that began tracking last Sunday, a few days after the DNC ended to settle things out, the net favorability for Trump came out at (in time order) -27 from Fox News, -36 from NBC News/WSJ, -37 from Marist and -25 from ABC News/Washington Post. Trump was able to survive that in the Republican primaries because the one demographic block that does support him is clustered on that side of the aisle. As the booth now opens to all voters it is a mountain to overcome.
Part of that sub-category aspect is also showing up in some of the polling now, which matters from a ground-game standpoint, and is part of the Power Rating…
Item: And as for that “Machine” aspect…
One of the things that has been focused on here as a key point is the gap in experience between the two machines backing the candidates, which will be a major factor between now and the first debate. The Democrats are not only better organized, but also more invested, and a key factor emerging now is that they are not just committed to winning this November, but have a unity about them into the future, while the Trump candidacy may well be a one-off for the Republicans.
As such when polls get released it creates opportunity for action, and there was something in last week’s numbers that was rather shocking to see, even in this bizarre cycle – in three surveys from respected pollsters that itemized their breakdowns, NBC News/WSJ had Trump only getting one percent of the African American vote; Marist two percent; and Fox at four percent, but dropping to one percent when Gary Johnson was included. Those numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt because of sample size within a poll, but they are rather striking. They also have had ground game impacts.
As noted in previous thread discussions the Democrats have cancelled ad buys from a couple of selected states that they now believe are relatively safe, and have created two new targets – Arizona and Georgia. Arizona is alive because of the growing Hispanic population, while Georgia becomes a target both from Hispanic/African American directions. The Democrats have opened two new offices in Arizona, and Clinton is scheduling appearances in Georgia, for two states they would usually consider out of play.
This creates a bit of a paradigm shift. Democratic support for Clinton has been tepid throughout the process; as noted here often since an election thread was opened last December, they simply assumed 2016 was hers, without doing their homework. But while particular feelings for Clinton will not likely grow stronger, the overall landscape opportunity at hand may bring a shift in energy and lead to increased fund raising. This is not just about 2016 for the Democrats, but that if they can make in-roads in states like Arizona and Georgia it is also part of the 2020 campaign process, in which the NHW vote may be as low as 64-65 percent of the total. Hence, part of our power rating is not just isolating Clinton vs. Trump, but instead political machines at different weight classes in terms of the opportunity that is in front of them. As for how the Electoral College plays out, that gap will likely mean even more than in the popular vote. For now, betting value extends to Democrats up to -325.
About Last Night…
Or in this case yesterday afternoon, but as poster Sharp Sider noted in the weekend thread, the window of opportunity with James Paxton will be starting to close. He has been pegged for an “In the Sights…” ticket in each of his last three outings, the continuing narrative here that the quality of his pitches have been so much better than their Baseball outcomes, and Sunday’s win over the Angels offers a prime ability to better understand how good his stuff is.
Paxton became the first pitcher to ever strike Mike Trout out four times in the same game, in fact reducing Trout to 2-20 lifetime against him, with 10 Ks. That speaks volumes by itself, but it is also worth taking a look at how it happened –
That is a rather impressive assortment of both locations and speeds, and tells much of the tale as to why Paxton found his way into the portfolio. The problem now is that he will begin to show up in many others as well.
In the Sights…
Some days in this endeavor are not for the faint of heart. This is one of them, but to make it a little more palatable I will reduce a couple of sequences to being a single position. So let’s call it one-third of a unit on #955 Cincinnati (8:15 Eastern), and one-third each on Philadelphia Straight and Philadelphia Run Line (10:10 Eastern). These likely aren’t items you circled in the pitching forms over your morning coffee, but the value meter gets them in play. St. Louis does not belong at -190, nor the Dodgers at -230 (CGT in Nevada is at -240 already).
I wrote about Cody Reed last week, and his loss to the Cardinals stretches things even further – a guy sitting with an 0-6/7.30 actually sports a 4.05 from both xFIP and SIERA. Reed’s 8.4 K/9 and 54.7 GB% are a strong base to work from but the sport has not been kind. Some of that has been his own doing, not showing poise when the floodgates opened, but that is all more than compensated in the price, with a St. Louis team lacking form, and Michael Wacha showing an alarming lack of pop since the All Star break (27 hits allowed vs. only 13 strikeouts). This favorite does not bring the tools to be laying -190; the Cardinals have been out-scored by 30 runs over their last eight games, but fortunately for them snuck through a pair of one-run wins to get a 2-6 out of the sequence.
Meanwhile out in Chavez Ravine there will be another ticket on a Philadelphia team that has been showing up often in the portfolio of late – as noted here several times this is a young group that began the season without expectations, and because of that has been able to go out and play loosely. Now the Phillies are building confidence, and that puts them in the hunt against a Dodger team that like the Cardinals does not bring what this price point calls for. Julio Urias gets back into the rotation, something set before the short outing from Brandon McCarthy last evening, and it creates a headache for Dave Roberts as the game progresses – Urias has only had three relief appearances over the last 18 days, two of them with Oklahoma City, and he may not even reach the low pitch counts they have imposed on him. That is a problem for a bullpen that has Kenley Jansen and Joe Blanton off of back-to-back appearances, and Jesse Chavez and Pedro Baez off of multiple Sunday innings. The Phillies can hang around in this one, and the +1.5 also brings the opportunity for a “back-door cover” with some scoring in the latter stages against that L.A. bullpen.
The complete Point Blank Archive
@PregamePhd (a work in progress, feedback appreciated)