Recent trend shows under cashing for MLB total bettors
By DAVID JONES
What a difference a month makes.
Nearly 30 days ago, bettors who played the over in Major League games were thriving, as the total went over in nearly 54 percent of games the first month of the season. In the offensive-oriented American League, that number was almost a percent higher. For the first five weeks of the season, 20 of the 30 teams were even averaging more runs than a year ago.
But those numbers have fallen back to Earth – hard.
From Monday, May 25 through Sunday, May 30, all MLB teams were a combined 37-58-1 against the total. National League teams were 22-28, but the American League – with all its offensive prowess and designated hitters – was a wretched, 15-30-1.
“The AL has always been the bettors’ favorite spot to bet the over on,” Randy Scott, sportsbook manager for betED.com, said. “We see approximately 20 percent more over bets in the AL, than we do NL. The NL over/unders usually produce balanced action.”
For the season, the under entered Thursday night’s games covering 50.6 percent of the time in both leagues combined.
“Usually, the lopsided action will balance as the trend fades or swings back,” Scott said. “In these cases, there is usually a small window of opportunity for the bettors to recognize the swing back of a trend before the action has time to subside and the books to again react to the swing.”
And it appears that teams going over the total now reside in the National League. Entering Thursday’s games, Milwaukee, Florida and San Francisco each had over streaks of three games, with no other teams in baseball topping the total more than once.
Ironically, the two longest under streaks in baseball are in the AL, where Oakland (four straight) and the Chicago White Sox (three straight) are failing to light up the score boards.
“Sometimes crazy things happen and they happen in a cycle,” Scott Rickenbach, a professional handicapper at Covers Experts, said. “Like when it seems like most games every night are seeing a ton of rally-killers. Double plays, caught stealing, guys getting picked off, line drives seemingly always hit right at somebody.
“Sometimes the bloop hits versus the big hits are the most important thing to understand because that doesn't show up in the box score. Sometimes line drives are always hit right at guys or there seems to be no clutch hitting going on anywhere in the league. This cycles do come up sometimes but they don't last long and the key is to pull back carefully during a time like this if you're an over player.”
Even weirder for the American League, is that it has two of the best over teams – Cleveland (31-23) and Baltimore (29-24) – and two of the best under bets – Chicago White Sox (22-33) and Seattle (24-30).
And as the weather warms up, don’t necessarily look for a huge swing back toward offensive domination, but instead for trends to fade and results to become more consistent.
“Weather is warming up and the bats will warm up as well. The key is just finding the right spots,” Rickenbach said. “The nice thing about the overs in the summer is not that they’re so much more prevalent - because the reality is that they're not. It's just that the weather doesn't tend to hurt an over like it can earlier in the season.”