Five Tips for Betting on Major League Baseball

Handicapping MLB can be extremely profitable. It’s basically, pick the winner. There’s no point spread per se and finding underdogs gives the smart handicappers extra profits. What could be better than that?

As a baseball handicapper there is nothing that annoys me more than streaky pitchers. They can look for a long time like they can’t possible lose, and then before you know it – and for seemingly no reason – they can forget how to pitch for several games in a row. I place more emphasis on streaky teams than pitching unless I have a bad pitcher starting and his team is on an 1-7 streak. It can be tough to figure out when a good period is going to start or end, and you can lose some serious cash trying to pick when that turn might come. You don’t want to avoid streaky pitchers entirely, of course, because when they are losing or winning several in a row you can really pay off. 

One would have to be extremely lazy to ignore any matchup information and special circumstances that surround the current game. Not only do I look at home/away information, I consider righty vs lefty pitching and night vs daytime games. A pitcher’s effectiveness is determined to a large extent by the baseball team he is pitching against. Casual MLB bettors will address this in a very basic way – by assuming that a pitcher will struggle more against a very good hitting team than against a weak bunch of bats, for example. You need to go further than that, though. Sometimes the best pitcher could struggle against the weakest of teams if the team features a lot of lefties and he loses effectiveness against lefties, or if they are contact hitters and he is better against power hitters. A fly ball pitcher could do better playing in a big ballpark than a small one. In your baseball handicapping, you’ll need to look well beyond surface matchups to identify situations that actually significantly impact what is likely to happen.

The schedule might not be an issue because of who he is playing against, but because of where he is playing. Some pitchers are unhittable at home but terrible on the road, or vice versa. This can especially be an issue if the home field is a particularly generous park for pitchers. I looked at a pitcher today that had a huge difference in their dichotomy.  He has a 1.69 era at home but a 5.63 era on the road. His overall era is 3.76 so depending on where he’s pitching I can put a proper value on the game. Before you get too excited or frustrated about a streak, then, spend time looking at where he has been pitching lately, and compare his road and home key stats.

Handicapping Pitchers ERA 

ERA is one of those statistics that gets a whole lot of coverage. It’s easy to understand and easy to calculate so the media relies on it heavily, and the public looks at it as a stronger indicator than it really is. There are several problems with ERA that make it a less meaningful stat for handicappers, though. The biggest problem is that there are a wide range of factors that are totally beyond a pitchers control that can have an affect on the pitcher’s ERA. A guy will likely have a better ERA over a short period if he faces particularly weak teams than if he had faced particularly tough teams, so he is at the whim of the schedule maker. This can particularly be a problem early in the season when the sample size is small. A pitcher can also be penalized by playing in front of a weak defense. In short, ERA is not a strong indicator of the actual performance of the pitcher, and better stats should be sought out by bettors who want to win.

Strikeouts are sexy…but not the only stat I look at first. I’m more interested in the strikeouts to walks ratio. If they show 65K’s but also 46 bb’s, then I will take a pass as the walks are more of a consideration than the strikeouts. Everyone loves a power pitcher who can blow the ball past guys, and a game full of big strikeouts is always going to get coverage. By themselves, though, strikeouts aren’t particularly meaningful for handicappers. A strikeout is useful for a pitcher, but more strikeouts don’t necessarily indicate a better pitcher. In so cases a pitcher is sacrificing other aspects of his game in order to get more strikeouts. Instead of allowing themselves to be seduced by strikeouts smart bettors know that it’s more important to look at Ks in ways that indicate how effective a pitcher really is – like K:BB ratio for example.

Let me pinch hit for you for more information, more stats, trends and angles with proper research and analysis resulting in more winners. Baseball is a GAME OF MORE!