Baseball
The 162-game season, sports longest, with teams generally playing every day, begins the last week of March and culminates with the World Series, that now concludes the last week of October.
As in the other sports, baseball has changed dramatically over the last couple of decades. Free agency, strikes, and skyrocketing salaries have all contributed to make baseball a lot different than your fathers’ game.
In terms of betting, probably the notable change is in the pitching area. Baseball handicappers several decades ago looked primarily at one item: the starting pitching of a team. With the enhanced role of the middle relievers, followed closely by the closers, there are few pitchers in this day and age expected to pitch past the 5th or 6th innings.
For the bettor, the reliance on starting pitching may not carry the overwhelming importance as it did in previous years. Team defense, speed, quality position play and clutch hitting all carry importance in evaluating a team’s chances.
But the major difference between baseball and basketball and football is the fact that the two other sports use pointspreads. Baseball uses money lines. This means you just need to pick the winner.
The better teams in baseball win between 95 to 100+ games per year. There are 162 games in the major league schedule, not counting spring training, the wildcard games, American and National League Championship Series (ALCS and NLCS) and the World Series. So if you simply bet on the superior teams, day-in-and-out, you’ll come out a sure-fire winner. If it was that easy, we’d all be living in the Caribbean sipping cold beer and exotic drinks.
The oddsmakers put a price on the better teams and pitchers, making you pay extra for them. If you examine the baseball standings at the end of each year for the last 10-15 seasons, you might find one or two superior clubs in each division of each league. There are one or two thoroughly awful teams, and the majority of clubs win slightly fewer or more than half their ball games. In other words, you can make money betting against the worst and on the best, but you’re going to have to pay through the nose to do it. And, it doesn’t always work out.
First of all, the sports books don’t even like to carry baseball as a betting option. It represents a very small part of the action of the annual betting picture. And, the gamblers who bet the game are usually much more sophisticated than the football-betting public.
