Considerations That Are Specific to Baseball Betting
By Loot, MLB Handicapper, Lootmeister.com
All forms of sports betting have things peculiar to the particular sport. Baseball is no different. In fact, there are a lot of things that are exclusive to baseball betting. Let’s look at some of the dynamics of baseball betting that you won’t find in other forms of team sports betting.
One thing that immediately jumps out is the odds. Baseball games are bet using the money line. In other forms of sports-betting, you can’t merely focus on who will win the game, but you have to account for by how much they will win by or by how much a team will lose.
There is a certain advantage in the purity of baseball wagering. We simply pick who will win the game. So when you like a team to win, you don’t have to worry about how they go about doing it--just as long as they do. When betting on football or basketball, you will often find yourself pulling for something to happen and the team you are betting on is showing no urgency whatsoever.
You can bet on an NBA game and have a team favored to win by 11. If they’re up by 8 in the final minute of the game, they won’t be going all-out for you in that spot. Or if you have a college football team getting 31 points and they’re down by 36 late in the 4th quarter, can you expect them to really care about covering your bet?
When making straight bets in baseball, your urgency is actually matched by the team you bet. Unlike the football or basketball team that you bet to cover some arbitrary point-spread, a baseball team will be trying to win the game. Since that’s what your betting, that is a nice built-in little perk. You are betting on the precise thing that the team is in fact attempting to accomplish. Seems basic enough, but not all sports share that dynamic.
Major League Baseball wagering presents some different challenges in the area of record-keeping--monitoring your betting progress. In basketball and football wagering, you can bet the same amount and use your overall won-loss record to indicate where you stand. In baseball betting, however, the odds for each game are different. You could potentially end up ahead while hitting less than 50% of your bets. Conversely, you can be down even if you’re hitting over 50%.
When keeping track of your baseball wagers, the bottom line speaks the loudest. Put another way, your bankroll will tell you if you’re winning or not. It’s not as easy to organize mentally. In basketball and football wagering, you can bet the same and know what percentage you need to come out ahead. Baseball is more of a freestyle. While there are strategies in the area of money management, there are no set numbers to bet or a magic formula for how well you have to do in order to become a winner.
All sports have some element of getting screwed (aka: bad beat), where the bettor will feel he lost the bet due to some grave injustice. In baseball, a betting man has to have thick skin for some of the issues that come up during a season. There is a certain pain associated with not collecting money on a team that is up 6-0 in a game that is postponed by rain in the 4th inning. The same can be said for when your team is not given a chance to come back from a one-run deficit in the event that a game is ruled official after 5 completed innings.
There are times when rain can mess up your wagers on totals. If you have the “under” in a 1-0 game and the game is called due to rain in the 8th inning, you might feel a little victimized. While wagers on sides are honored after 5 full innings, or 4.5 innings if the home team is leading, any other wagers require a game to be played to its natural conclusion in order for them to count. That could be a good or a bad thing depending which side your bet falls.
So, when we look at it--we see a lot of pros and cons in baseball betting. Those who have done it for a long time will swear the advantages far outweigh the drawbacks. Chief among the items they will cite is that what you are betting on is the precise thing that the team is trying to do--win the game. That alone is worth a lot.