Welcome to our Major League Baseball (MLB) page! Here, you’ll learn everything you need to know about traditional sports betting odds and daily fantasy sports, better known as DFS. Below, we’ll cover:
MLB Sports Betting Odds
If you are new to this world, sports betting is basically the act of placing bets, or wagers, on the outcomes of sporting events.
There are many different ways to place bets on MLB games. The three most popular bets in baseball are the Moneyline, Run Line (or Spread), and the Over/Under (or Total). We’ll start by going into the details of each one of these.
The 3 Most Popular MLB Bets
Moneyline
The Moneyline bet is where you pick the winner of a game and you get paid if they win the game. With the Moneyline bet, it does not matter if the team you pick wins by 1 run or by 100 runs. If they win, you win! Simple as that!
The amount you get paid will vary significantly based on which team is favored to win that particular game. The less likely that a team is to win a game, the more the sportsbook will pay you for a correct pick.
Let’s take a look at a Moneyline example using a game from the OddsWarehouse MLB Historical Sports Database. Below is a sample from the database that shows all the statistics you receive when you purchase our MLB Odds Database. There’s a lot of useful information provided, including:
- Game Dates and Final Scores
- Home and Away Teams
- Opening and Closing Moneylines
- Opening and Closing Over/Under
On October 12, 2019, the Washington Nationals played against the St. Louis Cardinals. The ML Open shows the Moneyline when the game was first made available for wagers and the ML Close shows the Moneyline right before game time. If you placed a Moneyline bet on the Nationals right before the first pitch, you would have received odds of +128. When the Moneyline is a positive number, that means the team is an underdog. In this case, a wager of $100 would have paid out $128 since the Nationals won the game.
On the other hand, if you bet the Cardinals Moneyline you would have had to wager $115 to win $100. You need to risk more money to win less because the Cardinals were favored in this game.
To be clear, you don’t need to bet exactly $100 on any game. You can bet much less or much more if you’d like. This is just shown for illustrative purposes. Also, the payouts are net payment amounts. For example, if you started with $100 in your hand and placed a bet on the Nationals for this game, you would end up with $228 (your original $100 bet plus $128). But if you placed your $100 bet on the Cardinals, then you end up with $0.
Run Line
A Run Line bet is similar to a point spread bet in football or basketball. With a Run Line bet, your team must either win by a certain number of runs or lose by less than a certain number of runs. In MLB betting, the run line is always 1.5 runs. This is different from football and basketball. The team that is the favorite has to win by more than 1.5 runs for you to win your bet. The team that is the underdog must lose by less than 1.5 runs for you to win your bet. The sportsbook will encourage and discourage bets on either side of a run line by changing the payout odds.
Over/Under
Over/Under bets are also known as Totals. This is a wager on the total runs scored by both teams combined.
In the example above, the Over/Under closed at 7.5. If you wagered on the Under, you would need the combined total runs between both teams to be 7 or less. In this case, you would have won your bet!
Sports Betting Odds Sample Database
Below is a sample from our MLB Historical Odds database that shows all the statistics you receive when you purchase our MLB Odds Database. There’s a lot of useful information provided, including:
- Game Dates and Final Scores
- Home and Away Teams
- Opening and Closing Moneylines
- Opening and Closing Over/Under
MLB Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS)
DFS Hitting Database
Below is a sample DFS Hitting Database that shows all the statistics you receive when you purchase our MLB DFS Database. There’s a lot of useful information provided, including:
- Game Date
- Player Name and Position
- Opponent
- Home Runs and Runs Batted In (RBI)
- Slugging Percentage
- DraftKings and FanDuel Points
DFS Pitching Database
Below is a sample DFS Pitching Database that shows all the statistics you receive when you purchase our MLB DFS Database. There’s a lot of useful data provided, including:
- Game Date
- Player Name & Opponent
- Wins and Losses
- ERA, Hits, and Runs
- Ground to Fly Ball Ratio
- DraftKings and FanDuel Points
Frequently Asked Questions
There are plenty of online sportsbooks available, including Pinnacle, BetOnline, DraftKings, and FanDuel.
A Moneyline bet in Baseball is simply betting on which team you expect to score the most runs and win the game. This is the perfect type of bet for beginners with little gambling experience.
The + and – on sports betting lines lets you know whether a team is a favorite or underdog. It will also indicate the amount by which a team is favored and the resulting payout of wagers.
A Moneyline of +115, for example, means the team is the underdog. To encourage bettors to pick the underdog, you only need to wager $100 to win $115 (or any other amount…a $10 bet would win $15, and so forth).
A Moneyline of -115 means you would need to wager $115 to win $100. This is because the team is the favorite, and is thus “expected” to win the game.
The payout examples above are net payment amounts. For example, if you started with $100 in your hand and placed a bet on a team with a Moneyline of +128, you would end up with $228 (your original $100 plus your winnings of $128) if your team won. If you placed a $110 bet on a team with a Moneyline of -110, you would end up $210 (your original $110 plus your winnings of $100).