Runline vs. Moneyline

I’ve got very limited experience betting baseball as Im a football/basketball guy so I just want to clear something up on runlines vs moneylines.  I just see almost everyone plays moneylines when picking favorites and it doesn’t make any sense to me.  Here’s my break down, someone please pick this apart and let me know where Im wrong.

So for moneyline players, let’s say you hit at 60% in 100 plays.  For simple math purposes let’s say they are all -110 favorites in those plays.  You play $11 to win $10.  So……

60 win’s = $600,    40 loses = - $440. You’re up $160.

For runlines, they say about 30% of games end within 1 run.  But some of those are when your team loses outright so those are loses for both moneyline and runline and don’t apply.  So let’s say 20% of the time you lose on the runline where the moneyline would’ve hit.

60 wins, knock off 20%, = 48 wins - 52 loses

And from what I see, you get roughly 90 cents added on if you team is @ home and 60 cents added on when your team is away.  Let’s just average that to 75 cents added.  So in the above scenario, if your moneyline is -110 you get it bumped to +165. So…..

48 wins = $792,    52 loses = - $520.  You’re up $272

This is a significant difference, obviously I simplified the numbers here so maybe that’s the issue but to me it seems like runlines are the obvious way to go.

It's the 30% one run games and the losses that prevent RL betting being profitable

As totalguy pointed out earlier, it is hard to compare values in ML and RL globally. According to Covers, favourites have won 53.13% to date this year, and have covered RL 38.23%. The breakeven points for ML and RL, globally, then are -113 and +163, respectively. That is about extra 75 cents on RL, so based on what you have observed (60-90 extra cents on RL) RL is not substantially better. In fact, it sounds just about what it should be, on average.

One example, Boston ML is at -113 (as I am seeing it right at the moment I am writing this, on Pinnacle), and their RL is at +140. In this case, you would have to argue that you are not getting what you think you deserve on Boston RL tonight. The reason Boston RL is not getting what the global % tells it should is primarily because the game OU is set high (9.5) and Boston is a road team. On the other hand, Philadelphia ML is at -137, but their RL is at +169, more than a dollar difference. Again, the reason is the opposite of the Boston game.

Books know all these historical %, most likely better than we do, and they already take these numbers into consideration when they set the odds. Thinking betting RL straight has more value than betting ML straight is misleading, and Books are not that stupid to just give out a few extra cents for nothing.