Like the NFL on Thanksgiving or the NBA on Christmas, the Fourth of July is a flagship day for Major League Baseball, with specialty uniforms and marquee matchups adorning the fields of America’s Pastime for the country’s birthday each year.
This season, though, MLB’s schedule makers have shown themselves to have either a twisted sense of humor or a genius read on the zeitgeist (possibly both) by scheduling the Chicago White Sox and Colorado Rockies for a series in Denver beginning Friday on Independence Day.
In a weird way, it’s a perfect matchup for sports fans: The White Sox notoriously lost a modern-MLB-record 121 games in 2024, and the Rockies are somehow on pace to lose even more in 2025. Further, it presents a fun dilemma for a certain section of sports bettors who have found a rhythm fading these teams over the past couple of seasons, as well as a challenge for bookmakers who have had the unenviable task of trying to handicap the squads on a daily basis.
Had a bettor last season decided to bet $100 on every White Sox game, they would have been down about $6,100 by season’s end (according to Covers.com), making them arguably the worst baseball bet of all time. Things are not nearly as bad this year, but a daily $100 Chicago bettor would still be down almost $1,400 just over halfway through the season.
Colorado, meanwhile, is posting a net loss of over $3,200 for $100 bettors to this point, which would break the mark set by the Sox last season. The Rockies’ constant losing caused an enormous headache for sportsbooks in the early goings and has only continued as the season has gone on.
“Despite picking up some wins, the Rockies are still heavily bet against day in and day out,” ESPN BET director of North American sports trading Adrian Horton told ESPN. “With the Rockies going 12-30 since May 16, patron behavior has not changed much.”
“The first thing I do every morning is put the Rockies tax — as we call it — on,” Caesars Sportsbook baseball lead Eric Biggio told ESPN. “If you’re looking to find value betting against the Rockies, unfortunately, you’re not going to find it with us the majority of the time.”
With sportsbooks juicing up the Rockies’ opponents to enormous prices, bettors have had to get creative with how they attack the despondent team.
For example, Biggio says that when Colorado frequently plays its imposing NL West rival, the Los Angeles Dodgers, bettors largely won’t touch the -300 or shorter money lines that have become commonplace in the heavily lopsided matchup. Instead, they’ll opt to take the under on the Rockies’ team total, the over on the Dodgers’ team total, or even a Dodgers -3.5 run line, which is becoming more commonplace.
Colby Marchio, an avid baseball bettor and analyst at Betting News, says he has taken this route a lot this season and even targets specific players on Colorado’s bottom-of-the-league pitching rotation, such as righty Antonio Senzatela.
“I’ve made a point to really hone in and look at the numbers whenever they’re playing a good team,” he told ESPN. “I’m going to have a system play whenever [Senzatela] is out there to take team total runs or run line or whatever is the best value.”
Another way to extract value from opponents of the Rockies is to parlay them with another team… perhaps one playing another horrifically bad team like, say, the White Sox.
If a $100 bettor had decided to fade both Chicago and Colorado in a parlay every day they both played, excluding doubleheaders, it would have resulted in a 34-34 record and a net gain of $742 through June. Including doubleheaders and parlaying all games on those days, the record climbs to 36-36 and the profit jumps to $1,115, according to ESPN Research.
If the same bettor decided to do the inverse and parlay wins for the Rockies and White Sox every day, even with the massive plus odds, they’d be down almost $3,000 (including doubleheaders) through June.
Brad Bartel, a Chicago-based bettor whom ESPN interviewed for his love of fading the White Sox last year, says he took to fading the Rockies in May this season when it started to become clear that they could be even worse.
He took the fade parlay route a few times with varying degrees of success, but ultimately decided to roll over his consistent winnings on Colorado fades each night. The inherent volatility of baseball’s sheer number of games meant that Bartel would lose too much of the winnings if he kept the strategy going too long (when the Rockies inevitably won a game), so he opted to pull some money out after “like three [straight] losses” by Colorado.
“It really takes a pretty bad team to lose so consistently,” he said. “You’re always going to have those instances where the bad team still has a good night and the good team has a bad night, so anything can always happen.”
This idea used to be more true in professional baseball, but as the payroll disparity between the best and worst teams continues to widen, so too does the talent gap. Even before the record-breaking stink of the White Sox and Rockies, the Athletics were the team to fade in 2023 when they lost 112 games — which was actually much better than it could have been given their astounding 45 losses through their first 55 games.
Bookmakers used to be able to rely on bad teams winning every so often to recoup their losses from the popular chalk, but they’ve had to rethink their strategy in this new era.
“The old axiom in baseball used to be, ‘Even the bad teams win one out every three games.’ They’re going to have to change that because that’s just not the case anymore,” Biggio laments.
For the time being, bettors and sportsbooks alike will just have to lean into the macabre exhibition of mediocre baseball amidst the patriotic festivities of the weekend — though with the teams, ironically, so evenly matched, it’s not entirely clear what the betting play should be.
“I’m not sure, I gotta figure that out,” Bartel said. “If you could bet on the over on errors, I would do that.”
