Chalk of the Day, August 14: Caglianone to homer at +213

The chalkiest home run prop on the Friday board, checked against 5,000 play-by-play simulations of the Royals at the Angels. The +213 price implies 31.9%. The simulations say 18.5%. Negative EV at about -42%; it becomes a play at +441 or longer.

Written by Jesse, NegativeEV. Last updated 14 August 2026.

Watch: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Hz8EyBnaw1M

• Sample: 5,000 pitch-by-pitch simulations of one game
• Window: 14 August 2026 slate
• Priced at: +213 at DraftKings, as quoted off the board at publication
• Measured: 2026-08-14

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 Friday's board, and the simulations disagree with the price on it. Twelve games had odds, 10 of the chalkiest selections were graded against the sims, and the verdicts came back 9 Negative EV, 1 Roughly Fair, 0 Positive EV. Nobody here is picking anything. This is a price the public is already taking, checked.

This prop is quoted over-only, so there is no two-sided market to strip the book's rake out of. The honest comparison is the simulated number against what the quoted price implies, and some of that gap is the rake itself.

What the simulations did

Across 5,000 simulations Caglianone's average is 0.20 home runs and the median is zero. The most common outcome by a distance is none at all.

The shape of 5,000 simulations:

The anytime line pays the same for all of the multi-homer games, and there are 1.5 in every 100 of them.

At 5,000 simulations that 18.5% carries a standard error of 0.55 points, so 95 runs in 100 would land between 17.4% and 19.6%. The gap to the price is about 13 points, roughly 24 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

Caglianone bats on the away side, which is the cleanest 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 1.1 points - neutralize it and 18.5% falls to 17.4%. Across the runs he comes up 4.50 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 4.5% of his trips, so whether he bats a fourth or a fifth time is worth more here than any read on his swing. That fifth 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 always do it.

What works for him

• His own season form props the number up by about 3.2 points - the largest arm on this page, either direction. A home run rate of .064 against .058 for his career, 39th of 299 hitters, top quarter of the league. An average exit velocity of 93 mph, 10th of 299, top 10%. He is hitting the ball very hard and the simulator is fed exactly that: neutralize the arm and the number drops from 18.5% to 15.3%.
• Playing on the road adds about 1.1 points. The guaranteed ninth inning, priced.

What works against him

• Grayson Rodriguez's career profile takes about 2.6 points off - neutralize it and 18.5% becomes 21.1%. It is not that he is an elite home-run suppressor: his career home run rate of .031 per batter faced is 131st of 237 pitchers, the middle of the pack. What he does is miss bats. A .241 career strikeout rate against .198 this season, with a 96.5 mph fastball. You cannot hit a home run on a strikeout.

The pitcher

Grayson Rodriguez, a right-hander, 928 pitches into the season and ranked against the 554 pitchers with 200 or more. He releases from a three-quarters slot, 5.56 feet up (43rd percentile) and 2.31 feet across (79th), with 7.18 feet of extension - 97th percentile, one of the longest strides toward the plate in the league, which is part of why 96.5 plays faster than it reads.

The ballpark

Angel Stadium ranks 29th of 30 for home runs, with a park factor of 0.71 where 1.00 is neutral. In the 2026 data home runs land on 3.6 of every 100 balls in play in the Angels' home games against 5.1 in their road games - 2,673 batted balls at home, 2,709 away, the same club on both sides of the split, so what is left is the park. Open roof, grass, 330 feet to left, 396 to centre, 330 to right, 151 feet of elevation. Tonight it is 73 degrees with an 8 mph wind blowing out to centre.

Both of those - the park and the weather - measured inside their own noise on this game's ablation, at 0.8 and 1.0 points. The park's season-long split is real and worth knowing; what the one-game arm cannot do is separate its effect from nothing at this simulation count. Take it with a grain of salt.

Caglianone, recent against season:

He bats third, and has for over 110 games, on 424 plate appearances this season. The recent window is 20 plate appearances - too small to carry an argument on its own, which is why the season row is the one the arms above are built on.

The rest of his night

The home run does not arrive alone. Split across the 5,000 simulations on whether it lands:

:

The game itself averages 8.16 total runs. His side scores 6.01 when the homer lands against 4.08 when it does not, so this is not an isolated event - it travels with the whole offence.

What this does and does not say

It says that at +213 the price is asking for a home run on a night when the pitcher misses bats, the park is the second-hardest in baseball to hit one in, and the hitter needs a fifth trip to the plate that the order around him does not reliably produce.

It does not say he will not homer. He is a top-quarter home run bat having a better year than his career line, and he goes deep in 18 of every 100 simulated games. Every play is relative to its price, and the two numbers meet at +441, 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. 37 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 37 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. 11 of the 37 came back with a direction we can stand behind. The price is +213 as quoted at DraftKings at publication, and the check is against that quoted price, rake included.

Inside the noise floor

26 of the 37 arms sit inside their own noise, including most of what you would reach for first: his own career profile as a hitter (1.7 points), Rodriguez's season form (1.3), what Rodriguez has been throwing lately (1.0), the hitter's own recent form (0.9), the weather (1.0), the ballpark (0.8), the rest of the order without him (0.2) and how long Rodriguez stays in the game (0.0). 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 three arms that clear their noise - his season form and the guaranteed ninth inning for, Rodriguez's career profile against - are the story, and the price is what turns a hot hitter into a bad number.

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