MLB Betting: 5 Proven Tips for Nailing Your Baseball Prop Bets

The MLB season is a 162-game grind and for bettors, it can feel even longer. It’s the longest of all the major sports lasting seven-plus months and a sport that might have the most betting markets. DraftKings alone has MLB odds for 12 hitter prop markets one day before the start of the season plus another 10-or-so prop markets on pitchers. 

The Spring-to-Fall action can take out even the most seasoned bettors and that’s why with baseball, more so than any other sport, it’s important to be focused and a constantly improving/adapting bettor.

Here are five tips for leveling up your MLB prop betting and ones that will hopefully have you in the black come the Fall Classic.

Five MLB Betting Strategies

Long Season

Baseball is a marathon. It’s not like football where we have a week to look at information and markets before placing wagers. Baseball is constantly moving, and pace is the key with over 2,400 total games on the schedule, not including Spring Training and the playoffs.

Some say the answer to variance is volume and that might be true, but if you’re newer to baseball betting, don’t overdo it, especially early. The main takeaway with betting on baseball long-term is this:

YOU AREN’T GOING TO GET RICH ON OPENING DAY!

Bettors need to know that baseball is a marathon and wagering your entire bankroll daily is a tough way to be profitable. Start with one or two wagers per day, and see how the results look. Maybe you find you are doing badly in hitter props and are more profitable in pitching props. Use the early part of the season to evaluate. Maybe there are some early-season edges you find, but like most, they will dry up.

Stick to strict bankroll management practices with bets being no more than 5% of your total bankroll. You can bet more on plays you think you have a better edge, but a handful of max-wager bets on a Saturday afternoon game because it's the first of the day is not a sustainable way to wager over the next seven months. 

It’s a long season, be there at the end. Many won’t and a lot of that has to do with going too big too early. If you have a bad day betting, shut it down. There are usually 13 games the next day. You don’t need to recover your day’s losses on the Angels vs. Athletics game at 10 pm ET just because it’s the last game on the slate.  

Market Familiarity 

There are more MLB player prop markets now than there were two seasons ago. I can count over 20 player props available before Opening Day. Just off the top of my head, there are hitter total bases, walks, strikeouts, singles, doubles, triples, home runs, runs, RBI, and stolen bases for hitter props. Being a profitable bettor in all of those is impossible without elite projections. Do yourself a favor, choose a couple, and be knowledgeable in those instead of thinning out your attention across most of them.

Be the hitter-total-walk bettor or the innings-pitched bettor. Narrowing your scope on the markets is a good thing. Pricing and handicapping take time with a top-down approach. if you’re looking at 15 markets a day, you’re likely missing things while also just looking at stats and information already priced in. The more time you can give individual markets the better. 

That’s not to say to ignore the other markets, but be aware of them. Information will come your way throughout the season and how you apply that to the betting markets will determine Uber Eats or ice chips for dinner. 

For example, if you know that a lefty pitcher is on a 60-pitch pitch count but can’t find his innings market to bet on, perhaps you can bet on a platoon player’s Under markets as the starting pitcher could have a short leash and give way to a right-handed relief pitcher that could force the opposing team’s skipper to pull the hitter you bet on. Less at-bats equals fewer opportunities which is great for hitters’ Unders. 

To pull it all together, know what markets are available but don’t feel obligated to bet them all. Use your time and resources to focus on a couple if you’re not using projections and be more knowledgeable in a few markets than a losing bettor in all of them.

Trust the numbers

Getting player projections for baseball adds a whole new element to the way you decide where your MBL betting money goes. It’s a massive time saver and one that does give you a better chance to find inefficiencies across the plethora of baseball betting markets. 

I did say earlier that betting on every market is a good way to drain the account, but if you can find trustworthy and reliable player projections, that is the exception. 

It’s efficient, time-saving, and gives you a great understanding of possible betting edges or mispriced markets. But the key thing is trustworthy numbers.

Derek Carty who I do a release show with every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday on Covers’ YouTube is the mastermind behind the best projections in the sport. The influence his numbers have over the market is next to none. This year, Covers is offering MLB player prop projections on-site for free which is a massive resource powered by Carty and THE BAT.

Head over to the main page and navigate from Sports to MLB to prop projections to find the best bets for each game across a dozen betting markets. You can also click on the player links to see recent performances vs. the totals and previous prop prices which is another resource that is valuable and hard to come by.

Carty’s numbers are the best in the business and now Covers has those same projections broken down into one-to-five-star ratings. Betting from projections can save a ton of time and when you trust the numbers, it’s a much better way of betting than digging into each individual market/player yourself.  

Studs vs. Duds

THE BAT X release show has won over 48 units in back-to-back seasons and when I look back over those 900 total bets, very few will be Overs on big-name players. 

Oddsmakers know the public’s betting tendencies and that’s with big-name players and Overs. That leads to more value in these star-player Unders but also creates value in lesser-known players, as well. 

When less money is bet on a particular market, it can lead to some value as the more money bet on the prop, the more that price becomes efficient. If the opening price is off and there isn’t a lot of action on it, it will stay incorrect. However, if that incorrect price sees a lot of liquidity, it will move and eventually lose its expected value. 

That’s where betting ugly can be profitable. Not many people want to bet on the Oakland A’s team total Over for wins because they are bad. But the public perception is usually a great place to fade for solid EV.

Learn to bet on lesser-known players and get in the market before volume adjusts the odds/totals and erases the value. These bets aren’t going to win every time, none do, but throughout a seven-month season, if you’re beating closing lines, you’re more than likely going to be a profitable bettor. 

Stay away from the studs and dig for the duds.   

Shop Around

This is good advice in betting in general but might mean more in baseball and that’s shop around. Shopping around means having multiple funded sportsbooks. This can allow you to get a better price. 

If Spencer Strider’s Under 8,5 strikeouts is -120 at DraftKings and +100 at bet365, those 20 points are massive. It might not seem like a big difference in a vacuum, but over 1,000 MLB bets throughout the season, those are massive gains. 

Let’s scale it down a bit. If you hit 52% of your bets with average odds of -115 and made 100 bets at $10 a bet, you profited $450.24 on your winning bets and lost $480 on your losing bets for -$29.76.

If you can get -105 odds instead every time, all of sudden you are a profitable bettor at +$14. That’s a swing of nearly 3.4 units. Scale that up to 1,000 bets, and we are talking about a massive difference just by spending a little time looking for the best price/number. 

Some books also offer props that aren’t available in other places, like hitter strikeouts. This is a very inefficient market thanks to its scarcity, but a potentially profitable one because of that. Get yourself a handful of outs (books) to get better prices, totals, and more prop market options.   

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