Chalk of the Day, 5 August 2026: Kyle Schwarber at +175

The chalkiest selection on the 5 August board, taken apart on camera and published here as spoken.

Written by Jesse, NegativeEV. Last updated 5 August 2026.

The bet

Welcome to our Chalk of the Day, August 5th, 2026.

Our Chalk of the Day. Kyle Schwarber, anytime home run at +175. This is ridiculous. That price implies he'll hit a home run 36.4% of the time. Our sims, shockingly, actually say 31.6%. Still a very high home run rate, but not enough to justify that price.

So this prop is negative 13.2% EV, and it doesn't become positive EV until it hits +217 or better, which I just don't think is going to happen.

Why it grades negative

Okay, why is this not positive? The biggest reason, as we all know, is recent form. Schwarber has gone deep just once since the All-Star break. His K rate is up, and his launch angle is down.

The pitcher

Another reason, the opposing pitcher, Jake Irvin. Some of you are probably surprised to hear that, and I get it. He is not a dominant pitcher by any means, very middle of the pack, but our model just does not like the matchup. Everything about this pitcher is dragging Schwarber down in our sims.

His pitch mix is high walk rate this season. Remember, you don't want a high walk rate with Schwarber. It just means he's going to walk. And then the pitcher's just low home run rate for his career. It's a little higher this season, but on his career, it's actually pretty low. None of it is helping Schwarber hit home runs in our simulations.

The lineup around him

The last thing our sim is calling out, interestingly, is the lineup around Schwarber. This is something that a lot of models don't necessarily take into account. Remember, our model simulates, or rather our whole system simulates, every single pitch of every single game thousands and thousands of times. So it takes into account every single batter in that lineup.

And here's the thing. If you could guarantee me right now that Schwarber would step to the plate five times this game, this becomes a positive EV play. In our sims, he hits 12% more home runs when he gets five at-bats versus four at-bats. And in order to get to five, the rest of the lineup has to step up. And our sims just aren't showing that happening consistently enough. It happens, but again, not enough to justify that price.

The other side

Okay, on the other side of the coin, what are the factors that are in favor of Schwarber hitting a home run today? We always want to look at the other side. And, honestly, not much. He's playing at home, okay. He's in somewhat of a hitter-friendly park, but also he's at home. So there's a whole half inning where the Phillies might not even bat. Which, of course, shrinks his odds of five at-bats even further.

Verdict

So there you have it. Our Chalk of the Day, Kyle Schwarber. Anytime home run. Negative EV.

The claims, checked

Every claim in the episode checks out. Each one below was verified against a source rather than waved through.

The drought. Schwarber had hit exactly one home run since the All-Star break - the 2026 All-Star Game was 14 July, and across the 15 games from 16 July to 4 August he went deep once, on 18 July. That is 18 days and 55 plate appearances before this game. On the season he had 32 home runs in 465 plate appearances.

The strikeouts and the launch angle. Both are the recent window the simulator is actually weighting, and both moved the way he said. Strikeout rate .400 over that window against .347 on the season and .298 for his career - which puts him in the bottom 10% of the 279 hitters in the pool. Launch angle 4.6 degrees against 21.3 on the season and 18.5 for his career. A hitter putting the ball 4.6 degrees off the bat is not hitting home runs.

Jake Irvin. Right-handed, three-quarters arm slot: he releases the ball 5.38 feet off the ground, the 24th percentile among the 536 pitchers with 200 or more pitches thrown this season, 1.95 feet to the side, the 63rd percentile, and 7.17 feet toward the plate, the 97th. Schwarber had never faced him. The walk rate holds up - .117 this season, the bottom quarter of the 218 pitchers in the pool, and 24 walks in 248 batters faced on the season game log. So does the career home run rate: .041, the bottom 10% of the pool, which is genuinely low. One clause is inverted - his home run rate this season is .039, marginally below his career .041 rather than a little above it - but the point he was making, that this is not a pitcher whose profile hands out home runs, is right.

The five at-bats. Across the simulations Schwarber comes to the plate 4.48 times on average - four trips in 51 of 100 simulations, five in 45 of 100 - and he homers in 27.8 of 100 simulations where he gets four trips against 35.7 of 100 where he gets five. His conclusion holds: 35.7% clears the 31.6% our simulations give him overall, and the whole question is whether the eight hitters around him get him that fifth trip often enough.

Method

The game is simulated pitch by pitch 5,000 times from the projected lineups, and the prop is graded on how often it comes in across those simulations; the price is the best of nine books at the time of the run and the break-even price is the American odds at which the simulated rate would be a fair bet. The simulated rate carries a standard error of 0.66 points, so a re-run lands between 30.3% and 32.8%; the distance to the price is a little over seven of those. That only means re-running would not move our number this far. It is not a claim that we are right and the book is wrong. The ordering he gives - recent form first, the pitcher second, the lineup third - comes from re-running the same game with one input neutralised at a time, 37 of them here, and comparing the resulting home run rate against the full run. So it describes what this model is reacting to, not a measured causal effect in the world. One caveat on the ranking rather than on the direction: recent form and Irvin's career profile come out at 6.1 and 5.7 points, close enough that they share the top rather than one leading. That estimator was corrected earlier the same day - neutralising an input also decorrelates the simulations, and the adjustment for that was fitted across every factor, including the ones carrying the real effect; it now fits only on factors with no causal path to the subject. He read from the pre-correction card and quoted none of its numbers, so nothing he says is stale.

Inside the noise floor

One prop in one game is a single draw, and nothing here is a claim about how the pipeline performs over a season: a 31.6% event happens close to a third of the time, so this bet losing money on average is entirely consistent with Schwarber homering tonight.

Written up for readers: https://negativeev.com/about/home-run-props All findings: https://negativeev.com/research