Baseball Betting Tips

We'll continue what we started last chapter and add to our baseball betting tips. There are literally thousands of tips and strategies you can find, but I personally feel the ones we list within our guide should be followed on a daily basis.

Some of the baseball betting tips may be a little more important than others, but all are vital to your everyday handicapping. Some are obvious, while others will be a little more intriguing.

What's important is that you practice them because I can assure you every professional handicapper does. As I've said before, there's no top secret formula to being successful, it comes down to hard work and doing the little things.

And that's exactly what the baseball betting tips are...the little things. They are here to serve as your guide to becoming a more knowledgeable baseball handicapper.

You'll certainly learn more and eventually create your own over the years. What's most important though, is that you follow them and never veer of course.

Alright, I think I've done enough preaching, let's take a look at some more baseball betting tips.

Now I won't go into great detail here because we've already covered this quite a bit in our Understanding Baseball Betting Lines Chapter. However, I did want to bring it up again because of the major role that tracking line movement can play into handicapping baseball.

The significance of understanding and tracking line movement is something that cannot be overstated. You don't have to be in front of a computer all day staring at line moves, but you must be able to check them on a somewhat regular basis to see what and why the lines are moving.

A few great sites for tracking line movement are Sports Insights, Show Me The Odds, and Pregame (they offer a very nice odds service, plus a wire service that will show you steam moves and injuries.)

Line movement is crucial because you may need to jump on a line as soon as possible if it's moving in the other direction. However, there may be great value in waiting if the line is moving more and more in your favor. Steam will typically move the line immediately, while public money slowly moves it throughout the day.

What's important is that you follow the movements so you can take advantage. It won't happen over night, but you can learn a ton by watching the lines move and it'll certainly help you become a better handicapper. As I said though, for much more detailed information, check out our Understanding Baseball Betting Lines Chapter.

I can't remember who told me this baseball betting tip for the life of me, but it truly opened my eyes and helped me to become a better handicapper. I really think this piece of advice is enlightening.

Just think about it, for the most part, every team will win 60 games and lose 60 games no matter how good or bad they are. This gives you a tremendous opportunity to find so many +EV situations when betting underdogs.

This tip will open your eyes as to why you should focus on betting the dog...because they can and will win. The more dogs you bet, the less you have to win to show a positive ROI.

Don't be afraid to bet those underdogs because they can offer a number of value opportunities throughout the year. So many novice handicappers get caught up and think they always have to bet the favorites.

Well, just put that out of your head right now because every team will win 60 games and lose 60 games, it's up to you to find those situations where value is on your side...this is one of the baseball betting tips that is quite obvious, but when you think about it, it just makes so much sense.

You've heard it before I know, but baseball has the longest season (both games and months played) of all professional sports. You'll have many ups, but you'll have many downs as well, what's important is you stay even keel throughout the year.

When things are going great, you have to realize things will eventually turn. When it looks like you're never going to get back on track, you have to be patient because you'll eventually start winning again.

You can never get to high or to low because your emotions will no doubt get the best of you...trust me, I've been there. The baseball season is a marathon, not a sprint.

Without discipline, money management, and a sound strategy, you'll be sitting on the sidelines by the end of June. Don't be that guy. Stay the course and never forget that it's a long term investment.

Home field advantage may not be nearly as important as you might think. Now don't get me wrong, it certainly plays a factor, but it's not something that's nearly as crucial as with other sports.

According to Betting Baseball 2009, home teams win about 58% of the time in the NFL, 63% of the time in the NHL, and 60% of the time in the NBA. However in baseball, home teams only win around 54% of the time.

Now this isn't anything to shake a stick at because 54% is still a significant number. What's also important to go along with this, is that home field advantage is calculated to be around 17 cents.

So with that being the case, you should be able to find some nice +EV situations in taking away dogs with the home favorite line being inflated to over compensate for home field advantage. While home field is important to recognize, I truly believe you shouldn't let it over influence your handicapping data.

This is one of those baseball betting tips that could probably be debated forever and there certainly is reason for the debate. Umpires try to be as objective as possible, but they are human beings and also face outside factors (the league office).

Obviously, the home plate umpire is who were really referring to. I do think it's somewhat important to know who and what they're tendencies are because it can play a difference in a game...especially with totals.

Most handicapping information sites will list who is behind the plate (when it's known), but it's up to you to find out more information about the ump. For detailed statistics on each umpire check out The Logical Approach (by far one of the best handicapping sites on the internet...I highly encourage you check it out).

However, many studies have shown that umpires (over the long term) don't play a huge difference in how many runs are scored. There may be years when certain umpires are calling more over games, but it's been proven those numbers always regress to the mean.

All in all, I'd put more time into handicapping the teams and less time into handicapping the umpires since long term track records prove there really aren't any developing trends with umpire tendencies.

Here's another one of those baseball betting tips that so many people forget about. Know the ball parks. Not only is it important because certain teams perform better in different parks, but it's crucial when betting on totals.

Knowing the layout of the ballparks and which way the wind is blowing are critical factors to consider when it comes to totals. We'll go into much more detail of how to adjust for park factors within our betting baseball totals chapter, but I wanted to bring it up here because it is a very important tip to always take into account.

This is a very interesting piece of advice that I first heard about from Allen Moody over at About.com. It's one of those very interesting baseball betting tips to say the least.

At the beginning of every year, there are always teams that will perform better than they did the year prior and teams that will perform worse...the hard part is determining which teams.

An interesting way to shed some light on this fact, is to look how teams fared in one run games the year prior. What Mr. Moody has discovered are teams that win the majority of one runs games (60% or more) in the prior year, tend to lose more than 60% the following year.

Now obviously, this trend isn't going to be 100% correct, but it is very interesting none the less and certainly something to take account of when handicapping throughout the year as well as total team wins. Mr. Moody does state that the biggest edge can be found by looking at teams who won a large number of one run games in the year prior to do worse the following year...although vice versa still does hold some merit.

I personally like to use it when handicapping team win totals for the year, but you can easily use it to mark which teams won or lost in an inordinate amount of one run games the year prior and keep in mind that they may regress back to the mean in the current year.

Well there you have it, some baseball betting tips that, at least in my opinion, are "must haves" to your baseball handicapping arsenal. They will serve you for years and years to come.

As I stated though, these are just a few to get you started or in addition to the others you're already using. Be sure to keep a word document or journal where you can continue to add to them over the years.

Now that we have some general baseball betting tips down, let's take a look at some pitching specific baseball betting tips in our next chapter. As always, best of luck in all your sports betting endeavors.

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