Bet the Home Teams Early in the Season

Baseball is a long drawn out sport with 162 regular season games. You cannot expect to get the 100% focus of these players in every game, can you? Since baseball games are so low scoring, it is hard to tell that a team "took a day off" as opposed to basketball. We often see basketball teams that normally score 90s-100s scoring 70 and 80 in certain spots. With baseball, when a team scores few runs we just assume the opposing pitcher was on fire.

All this is most apparent in the beginning of the season. Are you going to give it all you got at game 30 when you know you have 130 games left? Not really. And if you are the road team, you do not even have your home fans to play for. So all this boils down to is taking home teams early in the season.

Don't just trust my word on it, look at the past statistics.

Here are some home winning percentages over the past 7 seasons.

• Overall: 53.6%
• Games 1-81: 54.2%
• Game 82-162: 53.0%

There is a 1.2% difference in the win percentages between home teams in the first half of the season as opposed to the second half. 1.2% is quite intriguing because it the difference between -100 and -105! That is an extra 5 points of juice you get by betting the home teams in the early part of any season.

Over the past two full seasons, 2004-2005, baseball's home teams in the first half of the season went a combined 1354-1080 (55.6%) +55 units!!!