Baseball Moneylines and How They Relate to the Percentages of the Sport
By Scott, Major League Baseball Handicapper, Lootmeister.com
In baseball betting, the moneyline is king. What bettors need to do is understand what the money lines represent in terms of probability, in addition to understanding the percentages that govern the sport. Once we do that, we can act accordingly. First thing’s first--let’s see what the money lines represent in terms of percentage and then take it from there.
Moneyline to Percentages Conversion Chart
Favorites
+/-100 = 50%
-110 = 52.4%
-120 = 54.5%
-130 = 56.5%
-140 = 58.3%
-150 = 60%
-160 = 61.5%
-170 = 63%
-180 = 64.3%
-190 = 65.5%
-200 = 66.7%
-210 = 67.7%
-220 = 68.8%
-230 = 69.7%
-240 = 70.6%
-250 = 71.4%
-260 = 72.2%
-270 = 73%
-280 = 73.7%
-290 = 74.4%
-300 = 75%
Underdogs
+/-100 = 50%
+110 = 48%
+120 = 45%
+130 = 43%
+140 = 42%
+150 = 40%
+160 = 38%
+170 = 37%
+180 = 36%
+190 = 34%
+200 = 33%
+210 = 32%
+220 = 31%
+230 = 30%
+240 = 29.4%
+250 = 28.6%
+260 = 27.7%
+270 = 27%
+280 = 26.3%
+290 = 25.6%
+300 = 25%
Above you see the general range of baseball odds, with the vast majority of money lines not surpassing the +/- 300 range. Let’s see how these odds relate to the mathematical reality of baseball.
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Teams: We see that over the last many years, the great majority of teams win between 40% and 60% of their games. That’s the nature of the sport, where not a lot separates the top from the bottom teams. The best teams win close to 100 games. The worst teams win about 60 games. There’s a few exceptions, but they seldom do much better or worse than that.
So when we see teams getting money line odds that far surpass or don’t meet the 60%/40% dynamic, we need to give that some thought. Look at it this way, even the best team in the league wins 60% of their games, which equates to a money line of -150. But when looking at the odds, we see favored teams far above -150 all the time.
That has a lot to do with many factors. The team could be starting their ace. The opponent could be tired at the end of a road trip. One team may really need a win. So it’s not a totally lateral analysis, as the MLB landscape changes daily. It still raises an important point--it’s hard to win money betting on the best teams at inflated odds when the best teams only really warrant being -150 on average. If picking teams that are above -150, you better be on your game because they will need to win at a clip that surpasses what the stats suggest.
Now look at underdogs. We see bad teams commonly listed with money lines far above +150. If you pick a team and ride them all season long averaging out at a +150 money line, that team would need to lose about 100 games to make that a bad move. And in a typical season, how many teams lose 100 games? One? Two?
Pitchers: This guides a lot of our betting--who the starting pitchers are. When looking at how well a team does when a certain pitcher starts, we can’t look at pitchers’ won-loss records, but the team’s record when that pitcher starts. Let’s look at an example. Clayton Kershaw, unarguably one of the best in the game, is not an easy guy to make a profit on. In his Cy Young winning season of 2013, the Dodgers has a winning percentage of 57.6% when Kershaw started games. That means to just break even betting on Kershaw, he would have to average out at a money line of about -135. And you know that most times, he was way higher than that.
This is not at all meant to impugn betting on favorites or to imply there aren’t a lot of good spots to bet on favorites. It’s just that we need to understand the parity of the sport, that unlike other sports, doesn’t have a ton of space between the top and bottom teams. So when consistently betting on favorites, the numbers often don’t add up. We need to be careful betting with odds that suggest something is more probable than it actually is. It may work here and there, but over the long-haul, it’s a losing proposition.
