5 Reasons Why MLB Is the Only Sport You Should Bet On

Major League Baseball has always been the natural choice for me when it comes to sports gambling. But not all sports gamblers share this view.

Many sports gamblers get started by placing wagers on NFL games, because it’s the most popular sport in the United States. But you’re better off focusing on MLB instead of the NFL, and I’m going to explain why in this little guide.

Here are five reasons why MLB is the only league you should bet on. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should never place a wager on another sport, but specializing in one sport is almost always more profitable.

1 – Large Amount of Historical Data

You have to be careful when you’re using historical data. But if you use it the right way, it can be one of the best tools in your toolbox when you gamble on the MLB.

When you consider historical data for MLB betting purposes, this includes data from past seasons and from past games within the current season. As a rule of thumb, the older the data is, the less valuable it becomes for sports betting.

But you also need to consider the type of data that you’re looking at. The value of how the Mets did as a team 10 years ago is almost worthless. But some of the data from 10 years ago for the entire league may still have some value.

For example, knowing that the Mets went 71-91 around 10 years ago isn’t of any value. But knowing that the 10 teams that finished with the best records 10 seasons ago only got swept at home once is valuable.

If you know that only one team got swept at home from the top 10, you’d want to look at the top 10 teams nine seasons ago and eight seasons ago, etc. If the trend stands over the past 10 seasons, then the odds are extremely good that it’s going to stand during the current season.

Without historical data, you don’t have much of a chance to win while betting on the MLB. And you need to learn how to use the data in an effective way.

Even if you don’t use much data from previous seasons, the main reason why MLB is such a good sport to gamble on is because there are so many games over a long season, especially in comparison to other sports. You could collect and analyze data for a month before placing your first wager and still have plenty of opportunities to place profitable wagers.

2 – Pitchers Are Predictable

This probably sounds crazy. To the common baseball fan, pitchers don’t seem very predictable at all. But you have access to information today that MLB gamblers didn’t have in the past.

Velocity and spin rate have a great deal to do with how effective a pitcher is. If you know the velocity and spin rate of a pitcher when they pitch well, and when they pitch poorly, you can use this information to predict how they’re going to pitch in future games.

To do this effectively, you need to track the metrics for each start, along with how many pitches they throw and how much rest they have between starts.

Using all of this data, you can make some pretty good predictions. If a pitcher has consistent metrics. you can expect somewhat consistent performance. If a pitcher’s metrics have been moving one way or the other, you can somewhat predict if the next start is going to be better or worse.

This is also a tactic you can use from year to year, so you should build a database to track as many starting pitchers as possible.

As much as this is helpful with starting pitchers, it’s not quite as effective for relief pitchers. Relief pitchers are unpredictable. You can use the same metrics for them as I just covered for starters. But from appearance to appearance and season to season, you can see a wild range of outcomes.

3 – Split Stats

In the pitching section above, I mentioned all of the data and stats that are available for MLB betting, and this is true for every part of a baseball game. You can access split stats for just about any metric you want, and these splits are valuable when you’re evaluating games.

Home and road splits are valuable for both teams and individual players. Left and right splits are another valuable statistical tool you can use.

The truth is that you need to use every type of split stat that you can find. The overall performance of any team or player isn’t really of much value, because they’re always performing on one side of a split or another.

For example, a batter with a batting average of .300 overall looks like a great hitter in every situation. But if he hits .350 against righties and only .200 against lefties, he has almost no value when facing a left-handed pitcher.

The same types of splits need to be used when evaluating pitchers.


You can find the same types of differences when you look at home and road splits for teams and players. You can even find some interesting splits between day and night games.

The good news is that all of these splits and more are readily available to help you evaluate games and make more profitable MLB wagers.

4 – Dominance at the Top of the League

In an earlier section, I mentioned tracking the top 10 teams in MLB and how often they got swept at home over many recent seasons. This happens to be one of the tricks I use regularly to make a profit betting on MLB. But it’s not the only trick you can use.

I track many different things for the top 10 and bottom 10 teams in MLB, as well as the top and bottom half of all of the teams in the league.

Teams go through cycles, with new teams winning more games and past winners falling back n the standings. But you usually have a pretty good idea of who the top and bottom teams in the league are before the season gets more than a month old.

The sportsbooks also know which teams are better and worse and use this information to set betting lines. But this doesn’t really matter as long as you can make enough winning wagers to overcome the vig.

I use moneyline bets to make most of my MLB wagers in combination with what I know about the top and bottom teams in the league.

If I know that the top 10 teams in the league don’t get swept at home, and I bet on the home team in the first game of a series and lose, the probability of the home team winning the second game in the series goes up considerably. So, I bet accordingly, but wagering more on the next game.

This isn’t the only way to use this information, but it’s an example to help you start looking for ways you can make more profitable wagers.

5 – Baseball Is the Same as It’s Always Been

If you follow baseball for a long time, you’re going to read and see things about how the game has changed. While there might be a little bit of truth in this, for the most part, baseball hasn’t really changed in 100 years.

Some rules have changed, but in the end, you’re still dealing with humans playing a nine-inning game with the team that scores the most runs winning the game.

Don’t get caught up in worrying about changes. Focus on what’s important and what can help you win more bets. The players create the results, and the players are the same as they’ve always been. This is a good thing, and you can expect the same things to be important in the future that are important today.

What all of this means is that if you can learn how to make a profit gambling on MLB today, you’re going to be able to continue profiting in future seasons.

Conclusion

Major League Baseball is the only sport you need to be a profitable sports gambler. The combination of a long season with thousands of games and deep historical data make MLB the perfect sport to make money on.

Once you learn how to identify the top and bottom teams each season, you can use this information to make money even if you don’t do a deep dive into other areas.

When you focus on the splits, you can quickly improve your game evaluation skills and find value. Finally, learn how to track pitching metrics so you can predict the upcoming performance of every starting pitcher in the league.