If you are from the UK or indeed most parts of Europe, then baseball is going to be a sport you likely aren’t all to familiar with. It’s actually one of America’s biggest sports and is often referred to as part of the ‘big 4’ that’s made up of American football, basketball, ice hockey and of course baseball.
What you may not be aware of is that a lot of UK facing bookmakers do actually provide a rather comprehensive betting market for baseball. Granted, it wont come close to the likes of US bookmakers, but European bookies have always seemed to go that extra mile over their friends from across the pond making even ‘lesser’ sports a better prospect with a Euro bookmaker.
We do realise that the bookmakers we have listed below will likely be pretty limited in what’s on offer for betting on baseball. Let’s be honest, the market coverage and coverage of the sport in general wont even come close to a football or horse racing, for example. What we will be looking for is as much depth as possible though. Whilst the sport is at it’s biggest in the US, the internet allows people to stream games should they wish and they can pick up all access tickets to watch live MLB games via the MLB website.
- In this Article:
- Bookmakers
- How to Bet
- Betting Markets
- Betting Rules
Best Baseball Betting Sites
#1 – Coral
We’re fans of how Coral set out their baseball betting page from the off and the way that you just got an overview of everything going on made it feel really easy to use. They include 5 markets in total which are money line betting, run line, total runs, 1st innings betting and 1st inning runs over/under. Like we said, when we first looked we didn’t actually think this would be beaten, but still agree that it’s a really good amount of markets to bet on.
One thing that we noticed, and often gets overlooked by punters, is that Coral provide a really solid pricing structure and when comparing it to the other books they were at worst equal in terms of odds, if not better. Hence giving them our number one spot.
#2 – BetVictor
BetVictor pushes Coral very close for second place and it could be a case of having a joint second with these two. They basically lose out because they have a couple fewer markets to bet on and whilst the same games are on offer, the depth of markets is a slight issue.
That being said, they did offer games from Mexico, which was the only alternative league we found outside of the MLB from our top three picks. Games looked pretty slim pickings and although we know little about the league in question, it seemed as though it was more for outright winner betting on their higher profile matches. In fact, what some bookmakers do is provide markets on request for some of their higher rollers and we wouldn’t be surprised to hear if this was indeed the case with this or not.
How to Bet on Baseball
Perhaps after starting this article and then compiling our reviews we have possibly put to bed a bit of a myth that baseball betting is only really available to players from the US. Depth of markets is the only thing that really separates each bookmaker and we found each really easy to use if you are looking to bet on the outright winner market. It just goes to show how well rounded European facing bookmakers are these days.
The next step to betting is to form some sort of research for your picks. Now this will be tougher for people outside the US as the sport is hardly ever really shown on TV and when it is, it’s usually through the early hours of the morning. That being said, there are websites that contain some decent betting information and you can even keep up to date with betting news from social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook, both for free.
Betting Markets
Don’t forget that when registering new accounts with bookmakers you can take advantage of their sign up offers meaning you basically get money for nothing. This should be taken into consideration before signing up and before placing your first baseball bet.
Run Line
The run line is one of the more popular betting markets and this is essentially handicap betting. Each team will either start with a positive or negative run line number meaning they start with a head start (positive) or a handicap (negative). At the end of the game the handicap is subtracted from the final score to create the handicap result.
Game Totals
Game totals are the amount of runs to be scored in a game. This is just generally picking between an over or under amount. Similar to this is the innings totals where you bet on an over or under amount for each innings. As the game starts then this market will turn in-play and adjust for each innings.
Money Line
The money line is basically the outright winner to you and me. Here you simply bet on which team you think will win the match at the odds shown. Remember that baseball does not include ties; so all results will stand even after additional innings’.
Alternative Run Lines
The alternative run lines means you can choose between a large number of runs to be scored by each team. They range from +/- 0.5 up to around 10. These will be shown in decimals as well, to eliminate any tied results; this market is very similar to the Asian Handicap in soccer betting.
Baseball Betting Rules
A game is classed as complete if just 4.5 innings of the match have been completed. If the game then gets suspended after this point then all settled bets will remain, bets will be paid out on the result at the time of suspension and should the game be tied at time of suspension, bets will become void.
Betting on the over/under market will require for the while game to be complete. This means that should the game get suspended at any point then all bets will be refunded. Likewise if one of the two starting pitchers does not start, then bets on this market will be refunded.