Get A Jump On Baseball Betting During Spring Training

Added on Feb 28, 2011 by Jack Thurman in

MLB

Of all the US professional sports baseball’s spring training is not only one of the more enjoyable for the fan but can also be especially valuable for the baseball betting enthusiast as he prepares for a profitable season. The NBA and NHL preseason is all but irrelevant, while the NFL preseason can provide good betting opportunities on mostly unwatchable games. Baseball, however, is downright pleasant despite the fact that the games themselves are completely meaningless.

Baseball’s training has been mythologized by sports writers for years, but there’s a lot to like about it that the other sports would do well to emulate. The enclaves of baseball training camps in Florida and Arizona have become more commercial over the years, but there’s not the conscious effort to ‘soak the fan’ like the NFL does with their exhibition football games. The entire baseball spring training milieu is by comparison extremely ‘fan friendly’–you might not get A-Rod to hang out with you and kill some longnecks but there’s a reasonably good chance you can talk to the guy and cop an autograph. For fans from the Northeast and ‘flyover country’ there’s definitely an appeal to the mild early spring weather in Florida and Arizona–even if they only experience it vicariously through television.

For the baseball betting enthusiast, it’s a good chance to get familiar with young prospects and particularly pitchers. Even if they don’t make the Big Leagues immediately there’s a good chance you’ll see them before the end of the season due to injuries or other situations necessitating a callup. This kind of awareness of top prospects can produce excellent value opportunities when they do reach the Major League level. For every heavily hyped phenom like Steven Strasburg there will be a half dozen or more very talented pitchers called up without any fanfare. Typically, a rookie making his first few starts at the MLB level will be a sizable underdog regardless of how good a team he plays for or how talented he may be. I call this the ‘Bull Durham fallacy’, from the speech that Crash Davis (played by Kevin Costner) gives to Nuke Laloosh (Tim Robbins) on his call up to ‘The Show’:

“Look, Nuke, these big-league hitters will light you up like a pinball machine for a while, all right? Don’t worry about it. You be cocky and arrogant, even when you’re getting beat. That’s the secret. You got to play this game with fear and arrogance.”

Good advice, but it doesn’t always work that way–every year there’s several pitchers that almost immediately are able to pitch effectively against big league hitters. Steven Strasburg is an extreme example but there are always lower profile guys who are pretty solid and offer value–guys like Arizona’s Dan Hudson last season. Nevertheless, the ‘public’ buys into the axiom that all young pitchers reaching the Majors for the first time are going to get pounded for awhile and that’s not always the case.

This also works with position players–the Atlanta Braves got off to a slow start last season but came on strong as the summer progressed. The ‘public’ saw the Braves as a team that lost a lot of veteran talent both in the pitching rotation and the everyday lineup players which made for a number of good value opportunities to play on them as they began to turn around their fortunes. Had you been paying attention during spring training you would have known that it was only a matter of time before Jason Heyward became a force at the big league level. After being hampered by a sprained thumb early in the season, Heyward put up MVP-like numbers down the stretch hitting for average, power and stealing bases.

The irony is that preseason baseball games themselves are one of the worst betting opportunities available in any sport. But if you pay attention to what’s happening it could set up good value opportunities down the road.