Watching 60 minutes the other night, you might have caught the segment on Bill James, the former night watchman at the Stokely Van Camp Pork and Beans plant in Lawrence, Kansas and is now the senior advisor to the Red Sox, whose sole purpose is to bring statistical insight to Red Sox management. According to the piece, James is the guy who invented "sabermetrics," loosely defined as the analysis of baseball through objective evidence. James felt the stats in the 70’s and 80’s were meaningless and he thought teams should be paying more attention to things like “on base percentage” and when analyzing pitchers, the most accurate thing to focus on is strikeouts, walks and home runs allowed.

Now looking through the bettors lenses and since I’ve got access to baseball statistics with my own little sports betting database, I’m going to shed some light on some of the numbers I feel can help the sports bettors on some of their own questions they might come up with during a baseball betting season. I get a kick out of comments about stats and trends and how people perceive them as useless information, but yet, they are betting into a number, not a team, but a betting line. How can people devaluate, when handicappers pull out facts such as; when ANY MLB Team played as a -140 to -160 Road Favorite - Before a division game - Coming off a 1 run lost - Coming off a night game - Coming off a Loss vs. NL EAST opponent; the OVER is 16-3-0 for the Road Favorite in this role. What is so useless about these numbers? It’s a fact, not fiction!

Nevertheless, when do you pull the trigger on a team that loses game 1 or the first 2 games of a series? Since most teams are finishing off their 3 game series today and using the 2007 statistics results, I’m going to share some of my findings on how teams did in their next game after Game 1, 2, 3 of 4 of a series. As I’ve stated in other blogs, adjusting to today’s betting world, namely parity, I feel using the “less is more” angle the number 1 priority handicapping today’s games.

Therefore, I’ve went back 1-year for the following findings;

Home Teams off a win Game 1 of a series:

221-184 SU (54.5%) and the OVER/UNDER at 182-199-24

Home Teams off a win Game 2 of a series:

230-188 SU (55%) and the OVER/UNDER at 206-187-25

Home Teams off a win Game 3 of a series:

212-178 SU (54.3%) and the OVER/UNDER at 196-177-17

Home Teams off a win Game 4 of a series:

35-20 SU (53.8%) and the OVER/UNDER at 20-31-4

Home Teams off a lost Game 1 of a series:

208-176 SU (54.1%) and the OVER/UNDER at 188-184-12

Home Teams off a lost Game 2 of a series:

208-150 SU (58.1%) and the OVER/UNDER at 188-184-12

Home Teams off a lost Game 3 of a series:

162-163 SU (49.8%) and the OVER/UNDER at 154-157-14

Home Teams off a lost Game 4 of a series:

36-32 SU (52.9%) and the OVER/UNDER at 29-34-5

As you can see, the home teams have the slight edge and what I find interesting, when a team wins game 1 of a series, it favors the UNDER and when a team loses games 1 of a series, it goes OVER. Then, when a team wins Game 2 & 3 of a series, the games tends to go OVER and when they lose Game 2 and 3 of the series, it favors the UNDER. Isn’t the “law of average” amazing how it turns up?

Here’s some data on how teams fared when they split the first 2 games of a series.

Home Teams split 1^st two games of a series

214-151 (58.6%) and the O/U at 165-182-18

Home Teams Wins 1^st two games of a series

109-97 (52.9%) and the O/U at 100-95-11

Home Teams Lose 1^st two games of a series

87-64 (57.6) and the O/U at 74-73-4

Home Teams Wins 1^st 3 games of a series

5-4 (55.5%) and the O/U at 3-6-0

Home Teams Lose 1^st 3 games of a series

7-5 (58.3%) and the O/U at 7-4-1

No matter what, there’s home field advantage in baseball and just imagine if Bill James would have taken those numbers from a betting perspective?