Betting Tips Before Opening Day | MLB Season Preview

Opening Day is TOMORROW, people – and the MLB generates a ton of revenue for sports books each summer, as it’s the primary sport to bet on when the sun starts shining. In this article, I’m going to break down five things you MUST know about the MLB from a bettor’s standpoint, and things we can learn from last season. 
In most books, the most popular bets are Spread (or Run Line), Moneyline, and Over/Unders. Unlike in the NFL & NBA, Major League Baseball is closer to the NHL; lots of moneyline bets, and sprinkles of O/U and spread bets. When focusing on individual hitters and pitchers, you’ll be able to bet on 1+ hits, strikeout O/U, “To Hit a Homerun”, etc. 
This season, you’ll be getting Mitch’s Lock Bet of the Day (MLB of the Day, for short) every single day in the season, as well as two “Follow the Trends” articles from me on a weekly basis. If you’ve never read my FTT articles, you can read the most recent one here. 
On a personal note, baseball is my favorite sport to bet on - and the sport I’ve had the most success with in the past. The NBA and NFL are usually good to me, but the summers are where I really increase my bankroll.

Alright, enough of that; let’s get into five things YOU need to know before the MLB season begins:

The first thing to note is that baseball is a square sport. “A team just won last night, so of course they’re going to win again.” “A team gave up twelve runs last night, so of course they’re going to lose again.” This is NOT the case. According to the Sharp Report, one of the most profitable things we can do is fade the squares; the public LOVES to lose money on big favorites. This isn’t to say that the squares don't win sometimes - they definitely do - but, you’re going to lose money betting on favorites that the public loves over time. When placing your bets, be sure to look at the Sharp Report first to make sure you’re not falling into the trap that the books want you to fall into. 

The second thing to note is that pitching matters more than anything. One of my most profitable (and something you’ll see me use every once in a while in the Sharp App Discord - link below!) ways to make money is on pitcher strikeouts combined with wins. For example, there are just some pitchers that win more than others - Kyle Wright won 21 games last year for the Atlanta Braves, but the Braves went 24-6 with him on the mound. The man who carried last season in this category was Cal Quantrill, who only won 15 games last year, but his team went 22-10 with him on the mound. If you put together a Quantrill 4 K’s / Cleveland Wins combo, you would have made some serious money. I’d recommend using the tools in the Sharp App, as well as websites like MLB.com to track batter vs. pitcher matchups. For example, even though they’re Division foes, Cy Young candidate Dylan Cease held the Minnesota Twins to a .042 batting average last year. Yeah, that’d be helpful to know. 

Third, and the most obvious, is that good teams are good. I’ll say it again; the GOOD teams beat the crap out of other teams. We’re not taking ML here… if you bet on the Runline (spread) on teams that won over 100 games (Dodgers, Mets, Astros, Braves), they went 353-295 ATS, good for about a 50U profit. Teams that were bad, were also bad against the spread – teams with over 100 losses went 306-342 ATS. But, also keep in mind that there are some teams, like the current OKC Thunder in the NBA, who are ATS killers; the Baltimore Orioles were the most profitable ATS team in the league last season. To me, runline is a bet that I like to make later on in the season – look for the scrappy teams and the good teams to cover. 

Fourth, let’s dive deep into the analytics. My favorite stat is wOBA - this is Weighted On-Base-Percentage. Then, there’s xwOBA - or, Expected Weighted On-Base-Percentage. Let’s break this down; players that had a higher xwOBA than their wOBA are players who simply got unlucky last year. These are players like Juan Soto, who, despite a .266 BA, had the fourth-best xwOBA in the league. Corey Seager had a 40-point difference in his xwOBA to wOBA - someone else who will look to start the season off strong. Then, you have players like NL MVP Paul Goldschmidt, who (according to the stats) got lucky last year, with a much higher wOBA than xwOBA. This is a good way to track specific matchups and trends, something that I’ll be looking at deeply this year in my Follow the Trends articles. 

Finally, let’s dive deep into the pitching side of things, and an advanced way to determine true strikeouts per game. A statistic that I like to use when determining how many strikeouts a player averages is not simply their average; that would be too easy, and something the public would look at and drool over. Nope; we’re going to take their average innings pitched (for example, Justin Verlander’s average innings pitched per game is 6.25), and then take their K% (JV’s is one of the higher in the league, at 28%), and then we’re going to take the number of innings and multiply it by 3 (number of outs per inning), and then take 28% of that. That’s how many strikeouts a player will average that game; JV averages over five strikeouts per game, using this data. Obviously matchups are something to take advantage of, but definitely important to note for your pitcher strikeout O/U.

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