One of the biggest rookie mistakes when sports betting on the MLB, is to base your wager on the abilities of the starting pitcher, and disregard the offense of the team they are facing. For instance, when Roy Halladay pitched for the Toronto Blue Jays, the sportsbooks used to make a killing off inexperienced bettors, when the Blue Jays would face the Tampa Bay Rays. Essentially, square bettors would base their bookie software picks on Doc’s abilities instead of the Rays offense. As a result, they would constantly lose, because the Rays offense always had Doc’s number when he took to the mound against them. Today we’ll be looking why good hitting beats good pitching.

In order to properly handicap how your bet should be placed, you need to look at the statistics for each team in each game. For instance, just because your favorite team’s starting pitcher is amazing, doesn’t mean that their team’s defense can handle the abilities of the opposing team’s offense. To properly understand why good hitting beats good pitching, you need to account for how many runs each team has scored in the past two years. If a team with an okay pitching staff such as the 2011 New York Yankees has a top 10 ranked offense, and your favorite team’s pitching staff is in the top 15, you may want to take the Yankees.

For the reason that the Yankees have led the league in offense for the last two years in a row, it doesn’t really matter how good their pitching staff is. The reality is, that despite however many runs the pitching staff may give up, the Yankees offense will always keep them in games. Good hitting always beats good pitching, because top to bottom a lineup ranking in the top 10 can become lethal at any time.