Sure
Today I did almost the same thing with money line. I used the same subset as above (2010-2012 regular season lines for games with both starting pitchers having >=350 batters faced during the current season; it’s slightly more than 2100 games). Then I tried to answer the question: what profit one would have got if he bet on BTCL opening line. That is betting all teams whose opening odds are better than closing ones. Off 1874 games I got profit of 26.76, ROI = 1.43%, winning 52.45% of bets. Then I considered betting on teams whose opening odds were 5% or more better than closing odds. Now the profit was 27.11 but for 465 games, ROI = 5.83, winning 49.89% of bets. For 8% edge it’s profit 29.96 for 133 games, ROI = 22.53, winning 55.64% of games. For 10% edge it’s profit 17.13 for just 60 games, ROI = 28.55, winning 60.00% of games.
So if you are able to spot games with weird line which is subject to big moves then you can definitely make profit of this. These games are rare and line moves can be easily based on urgent information that changes chances. In some cases it can be weather, pitcher replacement, injury information, which was unknown at the moment opening line appeared. So part of this edge just cannot be utilized in real-life conditions. Look: 29.96 profit for 133 games compared to 26.76 for 1874 means that whole lot of 1741 games gave 3.20 units of profit (were almost useless). So what really contribute into high ROI and profit are those 133 games for 3 seasons, all with more than 8% line movement*
* I use European odds so 8% of line movement is a movement from 1.8 to 1.656 or from 2.2 to 2.376. So this is 100/0.8 = 125 to 100/0.656 = 152 or 120 to 138 => it’s about 20+ cents moves.
But finding those 45 games per season... To me it looks like mission impossible.
Will be interesting to check the totals.
That's a nice idea with binning! I'll try this tomorrow.