This article is part of our MLB Picks series.
Spring is in the air, and that means baseball is back. It also means that baseball betting is back. With the advent of online sports wagering these past few years, there's never been a better time to bet on baseball. The betting menu has expanded dramatically to include all types of prop betting on strikeouts, home runs, total bases, etc. More new bets are seemingly being added all the time, which is a great thing for all involved. A larger betting menu means more options, and by extension more good bets available. This should excite fantasy baseball players, as we tend to follow the games closely, and have no shortage of opinions on the various teams or players.
With the new season around the corner, I thought now would be a good time to lay out some basics, and try to provide some useful tips for new bettors (or even old ones). First off, as with any gambling endeavor, price is everything. While football and basketball use point spreads to differentiate the teams, baseball uses a money line, forcing you to lay odds on the favorite or accept odds on the underdog. For instance, let's say your preferred team is -135 on the moneyline. That means in order to win one dollar, you have to lay $1.35 for the privilege of taking the favorite. In the old days (and still to this day at some outlets), they used a 10-cent line, meaning that if the favorite is -135, then the underdog would be +125, meaning a winning one dollar bet would return $1.25 in profit. In recent years, many places have moved to a 20-cent line, or even 30 cents and higher at some of the new online books. As mentioned at the top, price is crucial, so you really want to be cognizant of that, and always take the best price possible. Particularly when betting underdogs, as the prices can vary wildly from place to place. The reason I used -135 for the example price is that I generally prefer not to lay a larger price than that, because past that level it becomes extremely difficult to win often enough to show a profit. With that in mind, it's better to concentrate on the lower-priced favorites, or better yet underdogs if you can help it.
When betting on higher-priced favorites, many people (myself included) prefer to use the "Run Line", meaning that you're laying -1.5 runs with the favorite, or taking +1.5 runs with the underdog, similar to point spread betting in the other sports. This can take as much as 100 cents or more off the price of a heavy favorite, turning a -220 favorite into a -120 favorite (though now of course, your team must win by multiple runs). You can also bet Totals, so if you have an opinion that a game might be high-scoring or low-scoring, you can bet over/under 8.5 runs as an example (with moneyline attached, generally in the -110 or -115 area). Oftentimes, the best opportunity to bet totals comes the night before (i.e. overnight betting), as totals often move by as much as a half-run by the time the morning rolls around. Just something to keep in mind, if you're expecting movement on the game (whether on the side or total).
Now that we've covered the basics, here are some useful hints that I try to apply in my own wagering. Obviously pitching is extremely important in baseball betting, as the pitcher handles the ball on every play and has the largest impact on the game. Star pitchers command the highest prices on the moneyline (generally speaking), so it helps to identify lesser-known pitchers who are still working their way up the ranks, and try to focus on them as much as you can before the sportsbooks start making adjustments. Just as an example, some pitchers I found myself betting a lot last year (and targeting in fantasy drafts this year) were Ranger Suarez, Alek Manoah, and Casey Mize. I wanted to mention Mize, because a very interesting situation popped up last year when it was announced that he would have his innings reduced in an effort to scale back his workload and give him a bit of a break. Mize was reportedly scheduled to throw just 3 innings (or possibly 4, if the pitch count stayed low enough) over three consecutive starts. That one little piece of news essentially turned Casey Mize into an ATM machine, as his strikeout props (at least initially) were still being listed as if he would be pitching the whole game. The point being, you never know what little scrap of information might prove useful in the betting market, so always keep your ears and eyes open.
One thing I've always found useful with pitchers (whether for fantasy or betting) is to try and identify pitchers with a large disparity in their home/road splits (Dylan Cease was one last year, just as an example). Oftentimes pitchers perform like night and day depending on the simple location of the game, and with betting lines mostly incorporating overall stats (as opposed to splits), you can sometimes find value on some pretty obvious situations. It's also important to check lineups before placing your wagers, and it's worth noting that we have a great page to do so right here at RotoWire (https://www.rotowire.com/baseball/daily-lineups.php) with another helpful link at the bottom called "Matchups to Target/Avoid" which provides a useful daily look at some of the more notable batter vs. pitcher matchups that day. As with fantasy baseball, there's no end to the different methodologies you can use to identify different players and/or situations, and with the ever-expanding betting menu, you can almost always find something here or there that catches your eye. For that reason, I think baseball is one of the best sports to bet on, if not the very best. Good luck this year!
