Baseball is a sport that is played around the world but without question, the biggest arena of the sport is in North America. The MLB is the elite league for baseball on the continent and that is where the most iconic series in the sport happens - the World Series.
But baseball has a long history and other top baseball countries where the game thrives are Japan, South Korea, China, Cuba and the Dominican Republic. The top talent in the MLB just doesn't appear overnight.
They are often picked from global leagues, particularly those from Latin America and the Caribbean. Players are cherry-picked and offered the chance of a lifetime in the big leagues within the MLB.
So those leagues right through to the Olympic Baseball Gold Medal match give fans of baseball plenty to cheer about and plenty of betting markets too.
There’s no definitive point of history where the true origins of baseball lie, but the game is steeped in history. On the surface, it can look like quite a complicated sport to get into. But the basics are that the offensive team tries to score runs against the fielding team.
The batters are generally trying to smack the ball out of the park, getting a highlight reel spot with a Home Run. Each team has nine innings of batting and the team with the most runs scored during the match, wins. The simple approach to baseball betting is just deciding which team will score the most runs in the match.
For baseball betting, things can be as straightforward as picking a Money Line option on the outcome of a match. That’s just deciding which of the two teams on the field of play are going to triumph. But the baseball betting options run a lot deeper than that.
There is the Run-Line which is a form of baseball handicap betting, where you can, for example, back a favourite in a baseball match to win by covering a spread. A -1.5 Run-Line means that the backed team has to win by at least two runs.
Another popular market in baseball betting is to back a team to be ahead after the first Five Innings. With pauses and delays occurring naturally in baseball, it’s a great sport for live betting.
The options for baseball live betting are just enormous and it’s worth taking a look around at the different markets available to find ones that suit your betting preferences. There are tournament outrights to consider, the finishes of teams in their respective leagues and so much more like Totals, which is an over/under selection on the number of runs scored in a match.
Consider a single baseball match, where the baseball betting has a lot of focus on the performances of individual players within it. Prop bets are a big angle for MLB betting. There are different markets covering statistics on the starting pitcher through to the best-performing batter for a team or an entire match.
Baseball is a sport that is rich with statistics and studying those can help a punter put together a baseball betting strategy.
That is an open-ended question certainly in terms of clock time. There’s no set time limit. While each team gets 9 innings to bat, there is the potential for extra innings. That happens if teams are tied in their MLB scores at the end of the final innings and the match will go on until a resolution point.
If a baseball game goes to an extra innings, then one of two scenarios settle the match. Either the home team (which bats second in an extra innings) scores a winning run in an uncompleted innings, or the visiting team has outscored their opponents at the end of a completed innings.
The first World Series was played in 1903 between the Boston Americans and the Pittsburgh Pirates. It is the former that won the series 5-3.
The Designated Hitter is an extra player that teams can nominate to step up to bat in place of their pitcher. The DH usually doesn’t play any other role in a match other than that. Teams have to name a DH before a match, but it’s optional. If they don't, the pitcher has to bat.