Our Experts Have Ranked the Internet’s Top MLB Betting Sites

These Sites Are the Home Run of the Betting World

The baseball betting season is one of the best times of the year for sports bettors. Among the major sports, baseball has the most games to bet on, the most analytics-friendly rules (meaning you can bet on it using analytics), and surprisingly, a higher percentage of underdog teams win their games than any other league.

What all these variables mean is that there are several opportunities to discover value and make a profit. But before you can do that, you must first find the best baseball betting sites. To make money betting on baseball, you need a sportsbook with a wide variety of games and betting types, solid odds, and reliable, trustworthy service. We have scoured the web and come up with the following recommendations as the best baseball betting sites around.

Selecting Legitimate Baseball Betting Sites

When you start thinking about a profitable baseball betting season, the first thing you need to do is make sure you are betting at a legitimate site. The Internet is teeming with sketchy betting operations and fake sportsbooks whose main target is your bankroll. Luckily, we have done the homework for you and have not only found, but also vetted the very best Major League Baseball betting sites around. And we can't stress enough how important it is to choose a good one.

Several different variables play a role in our recommendations. If you're looking for a more thorough understanding of the exact type of conditions we look at when ranking sportsbooks, you should take the time to read the very detailed descriptions we have on our site. That said, the following are some of the most important conditions we look at when trying to ensure that the baseball betting sites we recommend to you are safe, secure and worth your time.

Beginner’s Guide to Betting on Baseball

Once you have found an ideal Major League Baseball betting site, you are ready to start placing your bets. But first - before you start betting - you need to understand the different types of bets that are available for baseball betting. Wagering on the outcome of MLB games can be done in many ways, some of which are found throughout the world of sports gambling and some of which are unique to this particular pastime.

The next step is to have a firm grasp on the sport. You'll want to know the different ways leagues can set up their rules, how they can switch from on-season to off-season, and what kind of things you want to bet on when you're betting on baseball. You'll also want to know the kind of terminology used in gambling, especially as it's used in baseball betting. Understanding the sport, understanding what can happen in a game and why it can happen, and understanding the game from an entertainment perspective (what makes it fun to watch) are also good steps to take.

If you are completely new to the sport, here are two basic things to keep in mind when predicting the outcome of a game.

• Each team has its own unique ballpark, and each of those ballparks has its own site-specific dimensions that affect how well pitchers and hitters perform. Knowing whether a ballpark is a good place for pitchers or hitters before you seal the deal on a bet is the most important position in the game, the starting pitcher. It is also the variable on which the majority of the betting public bases their picks
• Travel plays a critical role in the performance of teams
• Umpire statistics can be found online at destinations such as Rotowire.com. A given umpire's strike zone has a big effect on how many runs are scored, and that makes these guys vital to total betting
• In the National League, pitchers are required to take at-bats. In the American League, pitchers never bat
• a designated hitter takes their place in the lineup
• It is often neglected and underestimated. Yet he can be just as important as the starting pitcher in determining the outcome of a game. Of course, he hasn't had it all his way

Types of Bets

Most of the traditional sports bets can be placed on baseball. You can make parlay cards, place futures bets, and bet on the money line or total runs, for example. But in addition to these types of bets, there are other bets that are unique to baseball.

One type of bet that is specific to baseball and that you will find is the run line. These bets apply a handicap of 1.5 runs to the total score in both directions. The underdog gets 1.5 runs, while the favored team gives them up, which is why their number is expressed as -1.5.

Another option is to bet on parts of the game. Since starting pitchers rarely go the distance anymore, bookmakers allow you to bet specifically on the innings you think the pitcher will pitch. You can often find bets on the results of those four and a half or five innings listed alongside bets on the full nine-inning result.

Baseball Betting Tips

Baseball betting is all about figuring out what elements will change the outcome of the game. You have to think about the quality of the pitchers, the way the umpires call balls and strikes, the peculiarities of the park, and the recent travels of the two teams. All of these things matter, and if you can predict how they will combine to affect the game, then you can make some money.

What makes baseball so great is that every single statistic is counted and recorded. The sport is not much of a team game. Instead, it is a series of individual contests that sometimes overlap, but often do not. For example, when a player is at bat, there is nothing his teammates can do to help him. What matters is how the hitter plays against left-handed or right-handed pitchers, what kind of ball he hits best, how he performs in different parks, and numerous other variables, all of which are tracked and available online at sites like Baseball-Reference.com.

Baseball Betting Strategy

The top baseball betting experts have a plan for selecting their picks. Numerous systems and methods can and do produce profitable selections when it comes to baseball betting. Many of these revolve around the concept of using a well-defined betting plan in conjunction with a specific type of game that meets certain pre-determined criteria.

You can make your gambling strategies as simple or as scientific as you like. When you apply such strategies to the game of baseball, they work best when you take into account a large number of variables, and especially when you take advantage of the kind of great data that is just lying around waiting to be used. If you have any hope of being a winning bettor in the long run, you will almost certainly need to implement some sort of betting strategy sooner rather than later.

Essential Baseball Articles

With its 162-game schedule and the data-rich nature of the game, baseball is the ideal sport for handicappers to bet on. Much of the competition is made up of numerous individual statistics that are easy to track and analyze. The same concepts that made Moneyball possible and Billy Beane famous also help sports bettors identify juice lines and make smart bets.

Here are some additional articles to help beginners find success when betting on baseball:

Additional Sports Betting Articles

Certain fundamentals of betting apply to all types of sports betting. It doesn't matter what type of event you're betting on, you'll always need to manage a bankroll and stick to a plan for how much money you're going to bet over a given period of time. Pay close attention to your edge issues and stay away from making poor decisions under duress. If you do this, you will avoid both spending way too much money and an insane amount of time trying to recoup losses after making what should have been an obvious losing bet.

In addition, it's fundamental to understand what you're looking for when betting on sporting events. A rookie mistake is to think that successful sports handicappers simply pick the team that's going to win. This could not be further from the truth. In reality, they're making non-mind reading, neuron firing types of predictions based on each team's probability of winning and then comparing those numbers to the odds, which carry an implied probability. If one side is considered by some to have a better chance of winning than the lines suggest, that bet is very much alive and worth making.

You'll also see that there are many different ways to display a sports betting line. The moneyline is the most common form and is displayed as a three-digit positive or negative number. A positive number tells you how much you will win by betting on that particular team, while a negative number tells you how much you need to bet on that team to ensure a win (if that team wins, of course). In Europe, decimal odds are the most common form of a betting line, and they are very simple. You use them to calculate not only the potential winnings, but also the total payout if you include the initial stake.

We go into more detail about all of these tips in the following dedicated articles:

About the Sport of Baseball

Although Major League Baseball is limited to North America, the sport reaches much further. The game thrives in Latin America, where many of the game's best players first see the light of day. It is also played at a high level in Korea and Japan, which serve as our other export bastions.

Baseball has a long and rich history. The sport has been around for millions of years and has seen many Hall of Fame-worthy players turn in many memorable performances, a plethora of plays executed to perfection, and a ton of stadiums come and go in its lifetime. Leagues have folded and merged, massive scandals have unfolded, and the game has changed in countless ways and places, but baseball has stood the test of time.

You could spend a lifetime studying the international game of baseball and still not exhaust the resources available. To get you started, here are a few articles that focus on this very topic.

Major League Baseball

The highest level of the sport, Major League Baseball, can be found in North America. With the exception of the Toronto Blue Jays, all of the teams in this baseball circuit are based in the United States. Major League Baseball was created when the American League and the National League merged.

The two leagues have slightly different rules, which makes things interesting. During interleague play and the World Series, the home team gets to use their league's rules, and the away team has to adapt. This makes for some interesting matchups and requires some creative tactics.

The league, now 115 years old, consists of 30 teams divided into 2 leagues with 3 divisions each. The major leagues have had a home in our country for many decades, long enough to see not only the influential athletes, but also the scandals and various controversies that have made those athletes (and sometimes the leagues themselves) the subject of discussion.

For more in-depth articles about specific aspects of Major League Baseball, please read our additional articles on the subject:

The Future of Baseball

Once the most popular game in the United States, America's Pastime has gone through different eras and levels of popularity throughout its long history. Viewership of the sport took a nosedive after a major strike, only to be resurrected by a steroid-fueled home run race. But even with all that, baseball's popularity seems to be in a slow but steady decline.

The league is trying to regain its place at the top of American sports after the events of the steroid era. Could baseball become the national game again? It's possible, though how likely is anyone's guess. The problems facing the NFL - especially those involving player safety - seem to be only a few years old and may not have been fully resolved. But it also seems that we're in the midst of a health crisis of sorts for our three major sports (four, if you count football):

To read more about the future of the game, see our article on the matter: