Baseball Betting: The Danger of Betting MLB Favorites
By Loot, MLB Handicapper, Lootmeister.com
Those who habitually bet on favorites aren’t the most in-tune lot when it comes to seeking out the best value for their wagering money. A lot of typical favorite bettors will see a team at say -220 when that team should be -180 at the best. They bet it anyway. That’s a mentality that will get anyone in trouble. When consistently betting on favorites that are bigger favorites than they should be, you simply cannot win.
Let’s always keep in mind that the best bettors are the ones who get the best value on their wagering buck. That might mean taking an underdog at +160 (See: Value of Betting Underdogs) when it should only be in the +120 region. That means taking a team that is +280 when in reality, it should only be +220. In other words, it doesn’t mean betting on favorites. When getting a price for teams that are actually better than what they should be getting--that’s one of the ways how winning is done. That means even betting on teams where you think, chances are, they’re going to lose.
That might sound counterproductive. Bet on teams you think will lose? Why do that? Well, first of all, this is not a sport where your opinion means that much anyway. There are 162 games per season for each team. The best teams lose 60 games and the worst win at least that much. That’s the definition of parity. The result is that there is hardly any surprise with any MLB result.
So over a long year, the power of your predictions will probably cancel out. Try looking for good value and focus less on half-baked predictions. When you are consistently getting better value than what the real value of your bets really are--that will add up to winnings over time. Where we go wrong is when we get hypnotized by these ideas of who the favorite and underdog is.
As bettors, we are also fans. We see a lot of stuff out there on the favorites--on ESPN, the newspapers, the internet, etc. It pounds it into our heads that a “good team” is something other than what it is. And in baseball, a good team, while more successful than a losing team, is not that far from those teams. A handful of extra wins here and there is what separates the top teams from the bottom ones.
Don’t expect the same things that make teams great over a season to manifest in a one-game window or even in a week. A team that is in first-place at the end of the season had to grind to get there. It’s not like a college football team flying to a 13-0 record and the national title game. A Major League Baseball team’s status is earned through attrition. It takes consistency. Every two weeks, perhaps they eke out one more win than a team out of playoff contention is able to win. Acknowledge the fickle nature of baseball and the sometimes-imperceptible difference between a playoff team and a team that is out of it.
What does this mean? We should try to shed these informal concepts we all have in the forefront of our minds of who the good teams are, who the OK teams are, and who the bad teams are. That is not the guiding light we should follow. Whatever edge you think you gain by betting on top teams is eaten up with the big odds you are laying on those teams.
Think about that the next time you find yourself betting on a -300 favorite in baseball. To break even making these bets, you need to win 75% of these bets. Name the last team to win 75% of their games. Other than in a few isolated cases, how many pitchers are putting up 75% wins in games they start? Perhaps there are some. But you will see -300 more a lot more than you will see a team or a pitcher with a winning percentage worthy of fetching a number so big.
Even with a modest favorite of -160, you have to win 61.4% of those just to break even. In 2012, no team even had a 61.4 winning percentage! That tells us that consistently betting on favorites in baseball runs counter to everything we know about how MLB works. It’s a game of failure. The best teams lose 60 or more games. The best hitters fail 7 out of 10 times. And betting on only favorites fails 100% of the time.