Live Betting: Is Baseball the Best Sport for In-Play Wagers?

For the vast majority of us, betting on sports comes down to gut feeling. Sure, you can crunch the numbers and even use an algorithm to decide on what’s best. But for those of us trying to keep it fun – you tend to go with your instinct. Of course, that means that many of us are cursing our instincts the moment we see the players in the team we backed making fumble after fumble, but that’s part of the charm.

And yet, the introduction of live betting on sportsbook platforms has changed the way we think about betting. It allows the bettor to mix reactiveness with proactiveness as they respond to incidents in the game. As technology has improved, so has the live betting experience. The speed of the platform is essential, allowing odds to update in real-time. But the best sportsbooks have mastered that now, meaning you can bet on quick-fire events like the next point in tennis or an ongoing horse race.

Shits in momentum can be slow in baseball

But when it comes to the best live sports to bet on, we might make an argument that baseball is king. Why? Because few sports have “slow momentum” shifts quite like America’s pastime. Yes, we all like to think we can sense shifts in momentum in everything from a golf game to a football match. But it can be much more sudden in other sports, and you might not have time to react.

Consider, for example, the pace of a typical soccer game. Momentum often goes back and forth. All it could take is a ferocious tackle to lift a team, or an injury to disrupt the flow of the match for one side. The same goes for football and basketball. The description above is somewhat simplistic, but the point is that those shifts in momentum are sudden.

And yet, with baseball, there is a slowness to the tipping of the scales, and it usually comes down to the pitcher. If you are a baseball fan, ask yourself how many times you have sensed a pitcher start to stumble in a game before he is hooked? Or, how many times you’ve been screaming at the television for the coach to pull that pitcher from the mound? It doesn’t matter if it’s Clayton Kershaw, Jacob deGrom or someone who is stinking the season out with a 9.45 ERA: you can sense when they are beginning to wobble on the mound.

Starting pitchers can run out of gas

We also know when this happens, statistically. The average MLB starting pitcher is pulled somewhere around the 100-pitch mark, and you can often see the wobble begin a fair amount of time before that – the strikes dry up, the accuracy and velocity drop, the batter is hitting foul balls that are split seconds away from being hits. Yes, the odds will change when a pitcher gets into a jam with runners on base, but you can sometimes sense a chink in the armour before that happens – and that’s the time for the bettor to strike.

Of course, none of this is easy; betting is not easy. And, we are in no way suggesting that this beats the system. Betting should be fun and responsible, and you should take your losses with good grace. But baseball betting is influenced by starting pitchers, and if the opposing team is still in with a shot when you sense that slow momentum shift by a pitcher struggling, the live betting odds can be generous to someone taking a punt against the consensus.

No baseball game is the same. But if you are betting live, then it’s worth having a think about how the odds reflect what you see in front of you. And, if you see signs of a pitcher’s struggles, maybe it’s time to be reactive.

Live Betting: Is Baseball the Best Sport for In-Play Wagers? to MLB Baseball Blog

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