Chalk of the Day, August 13: Schwarber to homer at +238

The chalkiest home run prop on the Thursday board, checked against 5,000 play-by-play simulations of the Phillies at the Twins. The +238 price implies 29.6%. The simulations say 26.4%. Negative EV at about -11%; it becomes a play at +279 or longer.

Written by Jesse, NegativeEV. Last updated 13 August 2026.

Watch: https://youtube.com/watch?v=RFw1YqZqd9w

• Sample: 5,000 pitch-by-pitch simulations of one game
• Window: 13 August 2026 slate
• Priced at: +238 at DraftKings, as quoted off the board at publication
• Measured: 2026-08-13

Narration on the episode is synthetic, voiced from the written read; the analysis is the simulator's.

The bet

The check:

This is the most-bet home run prop on Thursday's board, and the simulations disagree with the price on it. Nine games had odds, 8 of the chalkiest selections were graded against the sims, and the verdicts came back 8 Negative EV, 0 Roughly Fair, 0 Positive EV. Nobody here is picking anything. This is a price the public is already taking, checked.

The board ran from +204 to +245 on this prop across eight books at the time of the check. Every one of those prices is short of +279, so where you shop changes how much this costs you, not whether it costs you.

What the simulations did

Across 5,000 simulations Schwarber's average is 0.30 home runs and the median is zero. The most common outcome by a distance is none at all.

The shape of 5,000 simulations:

At 5,000 simulations that 26.4% carries a standard error of 0.62 points, so 95 runs in 100 would land between 25.2% and 27.6%. The gap to the price is roughly five times that error bar. Said narrowly, and it should be said narrowly: that means only that re-running the simulator would not move the number far enough to reach the price. It is not a claim that we are right and the book is wrong. A number that is systematically off is off to as many standard errors as you like.

How many cracks he gets

Schwarber bats on the away side, which is the one clean thing working for him: he is guaranteed all nine innings, and there is no scenario where his side is up after eight and he loses a turn. The simulations price that at about 1.5 points. Across them he comes up 5.01 times on average, at-bats plus walks, and the home run number moves with that count.

Trips to the plate, and what each one is worth:

Pooled across every simulation he goes deep on 5.9% of his trips, so whether he bats a fifth or a sixth time is worth more here than any read on his swing. The sixth trip is not his to take either. It depends on the eight hitters around him keeping the order moving, and in the simulations they do not do it often enough.

What works against him

Four arms clear their own noise on this side, and together they are the story.

• Taj Bradley's season form takes about 4.9 points off. He has been hard to square up this year: his hit rate allowed and his strikeout rate both rank in the top quarter of the pitchers tracked, and his home run rate sits in the middle of the pack.
• Schwarber's own recent form takes another 4.9 points off, and this is the one with a mechanism you can see. Over his last stretch in the simulations his launch angle is 13.8 degrees against 20.7 on the season. He is hitting the ball flatter than he normally does, and flat contact from a hitter whose whole game is elevation is the difference between a homer and a hard single. His home run rate over that window is .060 against .099 on the season.
• The weather takes about 4.8 points off. That arm neutralizes temperature, wind and conditions all at once, so the cause is not separable. It is 70 degrees with a 6 mph wind - not a wind story, just not a night the ball carries in the simulations.
• Bradley's career profile takes about 4.1 points off. A career home run rate of .037 per batter faced puts him 210th of 236 pitchers. He does not give these up often.

What works for him

• Who Schwarber is as a hitter props the number up by 7.1 points - the single largest arm on the page, either direction. A career home run rate of .095 per plate appearance, 3rd of 299 hitters in the simulations. An average exit velocity of 93.3 mph, 7th of 299. This is a top-ten power bat and the simulator knows it: neutralize that arm and the number falls from the mid-twenties to 18.7%.
• Playing on the road adds about 1.5 points. The guaranteed ninth inning, priced.

Everything else on this side sits inside the noise threshold: the rest of the order around him, the ballpark, how long Bradley stays in the game. All of them under a point.

The ballpark

This one is played at the Field of Dreams site: open roof, grass, 335 feet to left, 400 to centre, 335 to right. There is no home-run park factor on file for it, so no rank is quoted here, and the venue arm measured half a point in either direction of nothing - inside its own noise.

The pitcher

Taj Bradley, and Schwarber has never faced him: zero career plate appearances. Bradley is a right-hander, 2,137 pitches into the season and ranked against the 553 pitchers with 200 or more. He releases from a high three-quarters slot, 5.99 feet up (82nd percentile) and 1.06 feet across (14th percentile), with 6.45 feet of extension (51st percentile).

Schwarber, recent against season:

He usually bats second and bats first today. The launch-angle row is the one worth keeping in the back of your mind: the contact is still hard, and it is coming off the bat flatter.

What this does and does not say

It says that at +238 the price is asking for the season-long version of Schwarber on a night when the pitcher suppresses home runs, his own recent contact has flattened, and the ball is not carrying.

It does not say he will not homer. He homers in 26 of every 100 simulated games, which is a lot - he is one of the better bets in baseball to homer. Nothing here says otherwise. Every play is relative to its price, and the two numbers meet at +279, which nobody on the board is offering.

Method

The game is simulated pitch by pitch 5,000 times from the projected lineups, and the prop is graded on how often it lands. 38 factors were neutralized one at a time, each arm a separate 4,000-simulation re-run, so one-at-a-time swings do not sum to the projection. Those 38 cover everything that could bear on this hitter rather than every factor in the game: the other hitters' own career, season and recent tiers were skipped on purpose, because they are most of the cost and none of the answer for a prop about one man. 15 of the 38 came back with a direction we can stand behind. Two same-day 5,000-simulation runs of this game exist - the full analysis run behind the per-arm figures above, whose headline number is 25.8%, and the later run with refreshed lineups and weather that the live check grades against, at 26.4% - and they agree within one standard error; the verdict is Negative EV at either number and at every price on the board. The price is +238 as quoted at DraftKings at publication, and the check is against that quoted price, rake included. This prop is quoted over-only, so there is no two-sided market to strip the book's rake out of, and some of the gap is the rake itself.

Inside the noise floor

23 of the 38 arms sit inside their own noise, including every remaining arm about Schwarber: his season form (2.4 points), what Bradley has been throwing lately (1.4), batting first today instead of his usual second (0.7), the rest of the order without him (0.6), the ballpark (0.5) and how long Bradley stays in (0.2). Those numbers are real measurements and they are printed rather than dropped, but at this simulation count the arm cannot tell a small real effect from no effect. So none of them does nothing, and none of them can be named the thing driving this. The four arms that do clear their noise - the pitcher's season and career, Schwarber's recent form, and the weather - are the story, and the price is what turns a good hitter into a bad number.

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