Oh, Miami. With your sunny weather, beautiful skyline, and terrible baseball team. To be fair, the Marlins are not the worst team in baseball at the moment. But, oh boy are they sure making a run for it. With dismal .346 on the season so far, bookmakers are putting the Marlins\u2019 current odds of winning their division at +150000.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How bad is that? Well, as a general rule of thumb, when you\u2019re looking at odds, if you have to count the zeros, it\u2019s bad. If you can accidentally add or subtract a zero and it doesn\u2019t make any kind of statistical difference, it\u2019s really bad. But hey, at least they have the same odds as Baltimore and Kansas City of winning the World Series. Only those odds are +499900. So, you know. Not very good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But despite all of this, the Marlins have accomplished something truly remarkable. A genuine feat of sports odds. A streak so impressive, it deserves a closer look.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Last night, Tuesday, May 28th, in the Year of Our Lord 2019, the Miami Marlins hosted the San Francisco Giants (who, at .396 on the season, are also not a very good team). For this unremarkable game between two unremarkable team, the Marlins were just ever so slightly favored to get the W. They\u2019ve got a slightly worse record, but they had home park advantage, so it made sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Why was this mundane little bit of bookmaking so notable then? Well, the last time the Marlins were favored to win a game of baseball was July 3, 2018, in a game against the (now very good) Rays. For those keeping track, that\u2019s a streak of 125 straight games in which the Marlins were listed as the underdog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And hey, I would love to be able to say that they blew this incredible reversal of fortunes and lost the game anyway. But they managed to resoundingly beat the Giants 11-3.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, aside from having a bit of fun at Miami\u2019s expense, what can we actually learn from all of this?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
THE TAKEAWAY<\/p>\n\n\n\n