MLB Betting: Why People Bet on Baseball
By Loot, MLB Handicapper, Lootmeister.com
Betting on baseball and winning is not easy. Still, droves of betting men line up at the betting windows year after year, illustrating the sport’s gigantic presence in the world of sports betting. Obviously, the appeal is quite robust. So why do people bet on baseball so much? After all, most lose, so what’s the appeal?
First of all, people love the game. For some of us, it’s in our blood. We grew up watching it, playing it, and thinking about it constantly. For some of us, our childhoods were almost all about baseball. We watched games on TV, beg our pops to take us to the games, play on little league teams, spend hours organizing our baseball card collections, etc. At some point, it’s just a part of our DNA.
When we get older and start doing adult things like sports betting, baseball is going to be an option that naturally gets a lot of play. We feel comfortable with the game. We know it. It’s in our blood.
Then there is the built-in appeal of how baseball betting works. There’s a simplicity and purity to it. We don’t have to figure out if a team will win or lose by a certain number of runs--we just need to pick the winner. When betting against-the-spread in football or hoops, we are betting on things the teams might not be even trying to do. In baseball betting, we’re betting on teams to win. It doesn’t matter by how many.
We don’t need to win 52.4% of our bets to be even, like in basketball and football. We can win a few underdog bets that will allow you to absorb a small handful of defeats. Certain picks count for more than other picks. In other sports, every time you beat the spread, it counts for the same thing. In baseball betting, we can win certain games that really give you a boost and help better counterbalance the losses we will inevitably suffer.
Baseball is rife with opportunity. Sharp bettors know that the more games there are--the easier it is to exploit. In the NFL, each team plays 16 games and bookies have a week to work their expertise. It’s going to be a little tighter. In baseball, games turn over daily. There are 10 times as many games as in football. Naturally, there are going to be more opportunities. It’s like an Easter egg hunt. The more eggs there are, the better your chances are of finding more.
Not that you can’t find good betting spots in other sports. You surely can. It’s just that there are thousands of MLB games played every season. Not everyone is going to have a drum-tight line. There will be a few oversights along the way. You’re not often going to catch the bookie asleep at the wheel, but the opportunity to isolate some clever value plays will be there with more volume than in other sports.
Another reason for betting on baseball games is to make it more interesting to watch. This is more of a potential problem-area. When we make wagers, we do so because we sensed an edge or the odds are in our favor. There are many good reasons to place a baseball wager. Not among them is that you want to watch a game and have something riding on it for entertainment purposes.
Some of us are just baseball nuts. We could be at a high school game and be captivated and thoroughly entertained. Others, however, have allowed sports betting to make them jaded. Whereas they used to be able to watch a full regular season game and enjoy it, they now have to have something riding on it for it to be interesting.
The bookies want that. They want people to bet on games for reasons like that. When bettors use betting as a way to enhance their fan experience, the result is usually trouble. There are professional bettors that have a hard enough time turning a profit in this sport, which should tell you those who bet to make a game more compelling don’t have much of a chance. Other than that, however, there are a lot of good reasons to bet on baseball. Just try to focus on the reasons that could actually give you an advantage--your knowledge, experience, betting know-how, and the fact that there are so many games that you should be able to find occasional edges. Just be selective.
