If you are willing to put in the research baseball can definitely be profitable ... it is my favorite sport for betting and most consistently successful to me. There are ridiculous amounts of highly detailed statistics you can study but most of it is pretty simplistic, what kinds of hitters vs what kinds of starting pitcher and likely relief pitchers, handedness is of course the most obvious factor but certain pitchers and types of pitchers do better on day or night games, so too hitters, ballparks have different dimensions and defense/fielders have different skill levels all of which comes into play when thinking about the O/U as well as the edge that's given to the home team (which in baseball is much more significant than in a lot of other sports) then you can look at historically how pitchers have gone vs hitters (this is often too small a sample size though) but how a particular hitter or hitting team tends to do against a particular pitcher or pitching style ... there are a lot of different levels to it and maybe we could get into it elsewhere although of course the baseball season ended. Now, of course the bookies do all this sort of analysis too and probably better than we do but they're also setting the odds based on what people are betting and a lot of that betting is sentimental home team betting. Also the most profitable baseball bets aren't on the money line but on the run line which is basically the equivalent of the spread, you can bet that team A will be up by 1 or 2 runs over team B, you will consistently get good odds here but have to know what you're doing. So taking into account all these factors you can start to do pretty good. I myself tried to bet on 2 or 3 baseball games a week and went pretty in depth researching them. I avoided sentimentally betting on the Yankees at all costs. To give you a brief and oversimplified example, the just ended World Series were the Kansas City Royals vs New York Mets. The initial odds were basically a pick'em (-110) which ridiculously underrated the Royals, but a lot of that had to do with the hype that the Mets were getting given that they were on a ridiculous role. But the series came down to the fact that the Royals were built to hit fastballs and the Mets have a lot of excellent young fastball pitching which the Royals were quick to wise up to and the Royals also had far superior defense. I would've set the money line way back, but it wasn't, and I made myself a decent chunk of change there. Don't tell my Met fan friends, though :D
