Chart of the Day: Experts Pick Tigers in '08

With the first full day of action in baseball underway, here's a look at which teams the experts are picking to win the 2008 World Series. I only chose experts from media outlets with national target audiences as a way around home-team favoritism: ESPN, USA Today, Yahoo, CBS, Sports Illustrated, and a few others.

The blue bars in the following chart show the number of times an expert picked that team to win the World Series. The orange bars show the number of times a team was picked to make it to the Fall Classic but then lose. (Only teams with more than one expected World Series appearance are included in the chart.)

A couple of surprises. First, nobody likes the most expensive team in baseball. Only one expert even picked the Yankees to make it to the World Series. (Peter Pascarelli of ESPN has them losing to the Braves.)

Second, the conventional wisdom was that the Red Sox were favorites to repeat as champs, but the experts actually like the Tigers more, picking them to win 14 times versus the Sox's 8.

In the National League, the Mets are the heavy favorites to make it to the World Series, but are then expected to lose 75 percent of the time. The senior circuit as a whole is a big underdog with NL teams expected to win only 11 times versus the AL's 31.

Handicappers and prediction markets don't quite agree with the experts, though. Las Vegas gives the Red Sox 9:2 odds to win it all, followed by the Mets at 10:2, the Yankees at 11:2, and the Tigers at 14:2. TradeSports investors give the Red Sox and Mets both a 14.5 percent chance of winning and the Tigers and Yankees an 11.5 percent chance.

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