Baseball is popular among sports handicappers for a reason. They do it because it brings in cash, not because they enjoy watching the protracted contests all summer long. Due to a variety of independent circumstances, it’s actually one of the sports with the best profit margins.
For starters, the lengthy season offers enough time for system testing, data keeping, trend analysis, and information gathering to develop one’s handicapping abilities. Baseball is more of a collection of individual games, whereas more team-oriented games might be difficult to analyze due to the number of simultaneously moving parts influencing any given play.
Only the pitcher and batter compete; if the ball is put into play, only the fielder and baserunner participate. These moments may be separated out into the full game and studied separately in a way that other sports can’t. Furthermore, the majority of baseball wagering is concentrated on the moneyline due to the low-scoring aspect of the game. As a result, you are just selecting the winner without regard to the point spread. Baseball has more instances of underdog victories compared to any other mainstream sport, therefore, there are lots of opportunities to earn excellent returns. Because of this, you can make money as a baseball handicapper without necessarily hitting on most of your predictions.
Countless reasons why baseball is the ideal sport for gambling will be discussed in this post. We’ll examine how data is analyzed to obtain an edge by both the league’s front offices and handicappers, as well as how the game’s sophisticated statistics facilitate this. Also, we’ll look at how baseball bet winners operate and also how you can too.
1. Underdogs Frequently Triumph
Baseball is the best sport to wager on for a variety of reasons, one of which being the fact that underdogs triumph more frequently compared to any other sport. While underdogs win about 42% of their games in the MLB, they only prevail 32.6% of the time in the NFL, 30.26% of the time in the NBA, and 40% of the time in the NHL. With a winning percentage of roughly 42%, you may break even with a bet of merely +138 on average.
Given that we know that any club can defeat any of the others during the grueling 162-game season, by taking a few additional factors into account, we can improve the likelihood that our underdog picks will succeed, making the sport immensely lucrative without the need for a high winning percentage.
Some of the top baseball handicappers actually lose more bets than they win. The games they do wager on have positive value, therefore, it really doesn’t matter. The wagers they do win more than offset their losses! These little victories pile up over time to have a big effect on your bank account.
It’s important to keep in mind that if outsiders are winning such a large percentage of their matches, doing more research can significantly increase your bankroll with little more work.
2. The Average Bettors Aren’t Wise
The casual baseball betting audience is a gift if you’re prepared to put in a bit more work than the ordinary gambler. Since it’s the most important role in the sport, the starting pitcher is always listed alongside the betting odds in sportsbooks, and a substantial portion of bettors only take this into account. This alters the betting lines in manners that could be quite advantageous.
There are a ton of factors that are taken into consideration while choosing a game. Considerable independent variables include pitch factors, umpire, weather, weariness, recent trips, bullpens, and hot/cold streaks.
On a hot day in a hitter’s park, even the world’s finest pitcher might not be capable of overcoming a small strike zone. Yet, the general public won’t give these other crucial factors a second consideration and will almost certainly place massive bets on the well-known pitcher nonetheless.
Every shrewd gambler’s main source of income is defrauding the public. MLB is the only league that’s more appropriate for this.
3. Simple to Monitor Independent Parameters
Baseball betting features a number of variables with high connections to the result that can be easily researched and recorded, which gives it an edge over other sports. Baseball is a succession of one-on-one confrontations with brief interludes of teamwork throughout base running and fielding, unlike other sports with a time constraint or several simultaneous moving elements on any given play.
Consider this: throughout the majority of the game, an offensive player is either standing impassively on the field or sitting on the bench.
Every defensive play only involves the pitcher and catcher, and every offensive play only involves the hitter and baserunners. In addition, the ball never stays “alive” for long. Nothing happening in the game at any given time can’t be simply tracked and examined later.
The sport’s nature makes it relatively simple to dissect it into several little bits and isolate facts that have a significant impact on the outcomes. Each batter’s average against left- and right-handed pitchers, their approach to balls thrown in various zones, and their performance while teammates are in scoring positions are all known. Regression analysis is incredibly useful because every little detail is captured.
We can examine decades’ worth of data to see which metrics or patterns appear more frequently when teams triumph. These searches can be as simple or complex as we see appropriate, but the more pertinent data you have available, the better.
4. Countless Data
Handicappers have access to a wealth of information because of the nature and intensity of the aforementioned sport. As the game records everything that occurs, you wind up with enormous spreadsheets chock full of gaming statistics and data.
Nevertheless, people don’t simply create databases on events that occur during games; you can also discover information on umpires, park variables, weather, and just about any other factor that can influence a match.
In baseball, information from earlier years remains relevant for a longer period of time. The MLB has worked very hard to maintain the fairness of the game. They rely greatly on tradition and are reluctant to make any big changes that would fundamentally affect baseball. They do this to make the accomplishments and statistics of earlier generations similar to those of present-day athletes.
Even today, Babe Ruth’s accomplishments at the beginning of the 20th century are outstanding. No other significant professional sports league today matches what it accomplished one hundred years ago in any way. Basketball was first played in predetermined “zones”, players couldn’t dribble, and there wasn’t a three-point line.
The early American football players wouldn’t stand a chance of competing in the contemporary NFL because they didn’t implement the forward throw for years.
But, in the sport of baseball, Hall of Famers like Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth, and innumerable others could exit a time capsule and compete in the MLB as we know it right now. The game has astonishingly not changed over the years! The principles haven’t changed, even if modifications were made to the mound’s height and the tightness with which the baseballs should be coiled. And as a result, we may continue to learn a lot by studying games from previous decades.
5. The Analytics Revolution
The metrics or “sabermetrics movement” is a result of the vast amounts of data that are gathered and the personal nature of the sport. Front offices started seeking methods to understand better the components of winning baseball as a result of the abundance of statistics available. Our researchers discovered which statistics were actually associated with success rather than relying on deceptive metrics like Earned Run Average (ERA) and Runs Batted Ins (RBIs).
For instance, early adopters of “Moneyball” (a 2003 book by Michael Lewis, focusing on the team’s sabermetric, analytical, and evidence-based approach to building a competitive baseball squad) recognized that the on-base rate was far more important than the batting average. Through their investigation, they discovered an increasing number of instances similar to this and even created new, sophisticated statistics that provided greater understanding than ever before of how each player contributed to the outcome.
The beautiful thing about the analytics approach is that sports handicappers can benefit just as much from what the professionals understand. Finding an edge and using it to your advantage is the same mentality. We use this information to win bets, just like general managers do to identify ideal players and win games.
6. Plenty of Games and a Long Season
Baseball provides us with a ton of recent data to research in addition to historical data that still has some value. There are 4,860 opportunities to bet each year with 30 teams that play 162 regular-season games each. That’s a huge sample size with a ton of insightful data just waiting to be developed into profitable wagers!
Also, this allows you lots of time to develop and improve betting strategies. Perhaps you discover that home favorites often enough win +1.5 run line wagers to be worthwhile. You utilize this for a while with mediocre results until you find that your ROI (return on investment) is significantly greater when the odds are between -105 and +220! Then you discover that whenever a specific umpire makes a call, you’re losing bets, so you begin avoiding him like the devil.
You see, there are so many games that you have plenty of time and possibilities to develop your handicapping practice, whether it requires simulating games and creating statistical models or something simpler.
The lengthy season also contributes to the regular upsets. Even the most skilled teams struggle to remain emotionally present and focused during every game. Of course, underdog sides are winning a lot of games when you take into account long road trips, spans of total games on days in a row, and even the uncommon doubleheader!
7. Moneyline Guidelines
The moneyline method is the cornerstone of baseball gambling. There is an underdog and a frontrunner with odds that reflect the likely outcome rather than implementing a point-spread handicap and placing both teams at -110. The odds are used when the bettor selects either club to prevail outright.
A strong favorite, for instance, may be given a moneyline price of -220. You could wager on them in order to win outright, but you’d have to stake $220 to win just $100. Underdogs, on the other hand, will have odds that are in the positive range, like +175. Thus, if the “dog” wins, you’ll get $175 per each $100 you bet.
This enables handicappers to select the route to financial success that most closely fits their personal style. To gain money, one could concentrate on making a high percentage of correct predictions, play it safe, and stick with favorites or tiny underdogs. Another person can concentrate on underdogs who frequently lose but nonetheless end up winning because of the bigger payments.
Even the odds on baseball point spread wagers are unbalanced! A predetermined 1.5-run handicap known as the run line is used in place of a spread because the game is expected to be low scoring overall. Every run line wager places a -1.5 on the side of the favorite and a 1.5 score on the side of the underdog.
The spread has a fixed value, thus each game’s odds are affected differently by it. Baseball’s point spread just modifies the line, unlike other handicaps that reduce both sides’ chances to even money, minus the vig (-110). Because that winning by two runs or more is much more difficult than winning straight up, a favorite with a -180 point spread might have +120 odds on the run line. After collecting their 1.5 runs, the underdog who was originally +220 here on moneyline might fall to +110 or so.
8. Betting on Various Inning Lengths
The ability to pinpoint precisely what you’re betting on is another wonderful part of baseball betting. The bookies provide odds for both the entire game and individual innings. This is because starting pitchers often only pitch for 5-6 innings before giving way to the less reliable bullpen.
Going to bet on fewer innings is an excellent option for handicappers who want the opening pitching to be the main focus of their wager. The pitcher might still get hit by a pitch and be removed in the second inning, but that’s gambling for you. The five-inning wager is typically predicated on the duel between the two pitchers on the mound.
Gambling on the entire competition has advantages as well. As we previously stated, the influence a starter can have on the scoreline is overestimated by casual bettors. This provides us the chance to anticipate situations in which a well-known starter with a solid record may prompt massive inflows of cash into one side of the wager, boosting the odds of the other side.
We can profit from the surrounding factors in addition to the line movement if that pitcher is playing in an adverse environment or is supported by a weak bullpen.
9. Numerous Successful Systems and Techniques
There are countless profitable betting methods and tactics that have already been developed due to the abundance of data available to everyone. Choosing a system that uses statistics you can locate and comprehend, as well as investing the necessary time to uncover forthcoming matchups that fall inside the system’s predetermined boundaries, only require investigation.
You ought to be able to increase your budget over time as long as you’re placing bets at odds that are consistent with the winning % of the technique. The bookmakers adjust their odds in reaction to winning strategies, thus no one strategy will ever be effective indefinitely.
For instance, it would be extremely beneficial to find that home favorites in matches with minimal total lines win -1.5 run line bets 57% of the time. After the bookmakers realize the tendency, they’ll factor this information into the price and establish lines that are, at best, not very beneficial.
In any case, there are so many reliable resources available for the analysis and mining of data that handicappers can always come up with new techniques and strategies. Indeed, anybody can. To uncover patterns and trends that, when bet, produce a profitable return on investment, you must obtain access to a database you’re able to filter and play about with, as at BetLab. You can then try out various combinations of factors and numbers.
If you’re new to baseball wagering, you might want to locate tried-and-true methods that have been successful in the past and then add your own twist. We now know that matches with a total line of 7 are the best to wager on the +1.5 run line.
After eliminating these games, you can discover that increasing the return on investment by 8% only applies to favorites with winning rates between .500 and .650. Using only outsiders who have won between .420 and .520 of their games, you can then further improve the technique to make it even more profitable.
As you can see, the only boundaries are your creativity and the amount of work. Fortunately, there are several tactics that have already been devised that you can build upon. Start by adding more layers to one that still produces favorable results when tested against this year’s figures. You might be shocked by how simple it is to create a successful system.
10. High Winning Rates Aren’t a Must to Make Money
Baseball’s moneyline-centric betting lines have the important advantage of allowing you to build up a sizable bankroll without having to win a large percentage of your bets. Although losing about 60% of your matches with typical underdog odds, profitability is possible thanks to the plus-money payments earned from selecting dogs.
Obtaining positive value is rather simple due to the moneyline odds, the abundance of statistics, and other aspects that are open to research for free. You should first determine the implied likelihood of whatever side you are thinking about purchasing. This necessitates a rapid percentage conversion from the betting odds. According to the moneyline, this figure shows the possibility that the wager will be successful. You next decide if this inferred likelihood is a reliable indicator of how events will turn out.
A bet has real value as long as the actual chance of an event occurring is larger than what is implied. Let’s say you place a wager on a +150 underdog with a 40% implied value. You think that percentage seems somewhat low and that the general public is overly supportive of the opponent’s starting pitcher while underestimating the importance of the ballpark and the designated umpire.
You calculate that the likelihood that your underdog would triumph in this contest is 45%. That wager has some real worth! Your bankroll will increase as long as your strategies are successful enough to win and over 40% of your bets. Less winning is necessary to still make money the larger the average numeric values of the moneyline odds.
11. Many Options
Baseball is ideal for sports betting for one more reason: the wide range of wager types that sportsbooks accept. The moneyline, totals (also known as over/under), futures, and run line are the four primary types of wagers. With a ton of fresh proposition bets and non-traditional wagering options, internet bookies succeed in keeping things exciting. Now almost every facet of the game may be put into motion.
For instance, prop bets on online bookmakers at Bookmaker-Expert.com currently include “1st Innings Winner”, “1st Team to Score”, “Whether the Game Will Require Extra Innings”, and even a “Race to Runs” wager where you set a certain number of runs before selecting which team you believe will score that many first. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg in terms of what may be bet on!
You’re less likely to get bored because of the large variety of bets, which is a good thing. Occasionally changing things up can be enjoyable. More significantly, having a wide range of possibilities enables you to identify a specialty or area of expertise.
After practice, you might discover that while you’re terrible at choosing the first squad to score, you’re amazing at picking the final score. With online gambling, you’ll have the convenience of concentrating just on the particular situations in which you routinely succeed.
Conclusion
If you’ve discovered a method that functions, the absurdly long season gives you the chance to continuously throw it to the testing, applying, and honing your edge along the way.
Depending on the kind of gambling you enjoy, you don’t even need to win very frequently to walk away with a ton of money! Moneyline betting in baseball allows you to average a negative winning percentage while still making a big profit. That’s because, as long as you play for value, you may put underdog wagers that, should they win, will pay enough to offset all of your losses plus some.