Baseball Betting Checklist

With baseball season about to enter its stretch drive, and with the start of the 2003 football season just over the horizon, now is a good time to review some of the basics of baseball betting before the ongoing and exciting distraction of football manifests itself for the remainder of the season. Here are some of the most useful reminders:

Generally speaking, you want to be going with the "go-with" teams and "go-with" pitchers, and going against the "go-against" teams and "go-against" pitchers. At this time of the season, those teams and pitchers should be pretty well-defined. The problem, of course, is that the oddsmakers like to raise the odds on those pitchers and teams, making it expensive to back them with your hard-won dollars. The key lies in being patient and selective. Often, the odds will drop on a good pitcher after a poor performance. In fact, most good pitchers tend to bounce back after a negative outing. As long as they're healthy, that's often a good time to back them. Also, the odds of winning are inevitably lower for visiting teams. And, it's usually the case for the strong pitchers and strong teams that their home and road performances don't differ too greatly in the second half of the season. After playing 50 or so of their 81 road games, most good teams aren't fazed too much when they're playing beatable teams on the road. (Beating fellow contenders on the road can be another story, however.)

Also, many sports bettors put too much emphasis on searching for the best spots to back a go-with team. There is often just as much profit to be made by keeping your eye open for the situations to go against the worst teams. More and more these days in professional sports, teams that are hopelessly out of the championship races tend to go through the motions in the last one-third of the season. Many players lose their competitive edge, and some even get depressed just having to go to the stadium every day to face the likely prospect of another loss. Such hopeless teams often find ways to lose. The front office often deals away some of the team's useful players. And management experiments more with youngsters on their way up, whether those youngsters are ready or not. Mature teams in the middle of the pack can often win two-thirds to three-fourths of their outings against such go-against foes. And the odds are often not prohibitive. Just as winning can breed the expectation of winning, losing can breed the expectation of losing.

Use recent statistics. No other sport offers the daily action and lends itself more to statistical breakdowns than does baseball. But in the last two and a half months of the season, you don't want to be looking so hard at season-long stats that now might be distorted by good or poor performances in April and May. Those days are long gone. You need to know who's performing the best in June, July, and August, who's in a groove for the stretch drive, and who's wilting under the pressure or the long season. Teams can hit their stride and then lose it. Or, they can start slow, get rolling, and never be headed – like Anaheim last year. Identifying each team's late-season momentum, positive or negative, is a big key to success in baseball betting.

Note each team's "closer" in the bullpen. After the all-star break, the good closers are usually extremely well-established. The teams still searching for a "finalizer" should be obvious. Without a strong closer, it's hard to put away veteran teams that are in the midst of a pennant race.

Consider the "totals" and runs-line wagers as an option. As mentioned above, the oddsmakers are rarely going to allow you to bet on a hot team or a hot pitcher at a "cheap" price. However, at much lower odds you can often wager pretty much that the same scenario of the game will occur. (Once the price of a favorite reaches -150, I generally start looking for alternatives, one of which is to pass.) If a strong pitcher figures to dominate a weak-hitting foe, you can often find value in betting the game to go "under" the total. If the opposing pitcher is weak, you can often find value by betting the superior team will win by more than one and a half runs. Experience and extensive expertise on the lineups of the two teams count very much when making late-season wagers on the runs line or on totals.

Pay attention! Once the excitement of the new football season begins to build, the news coverage of baseball in the media usually decreases. And your former attention to baseball tends to become bifurcated. But if you're going to win in baseball wagering, you have to make an extra effort to keep up with both the fading teams and the rising young stars. Once September arrives, the national media in baseball tends to focus almost exclusively on the pennant races and, especially in the last few years, the unprecedented "home run derby." But if you take a half-hour each day to review the box scores and take a few notes, and listen intently to just a couple of hours of baseball programming each week, you're going to have a good chance of having a winning edge down the stretch.

Chuck Sippl is the senior editor of The Gold Sheet, the first word in sports handicapping for 46 years. The amazingly compact Gold Sheet features analysis of every football and basketball game, exclusive insider reports, widely followed Power Ratings, and a Special Ticker of key injuries and team chemistry. Look for The Gold Sheet's new 2003 College and Pro Football Annual on newsstands now. To reserve a copy, call The Gold Sheet at (800) 798-GOLD (4653) and mention that you read about it in Card Player. You can look up The Gold Sheet on the web at www.goldsheet.com.