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Any Major League Baseball fan understands that when the home team is leading entering the ninth inning, the road team has to come back and tie or take the lead or the game will be over without the home team batting in the bottom of the ninth.

Given that home teams can often get one less at-bat than the road teams, road teams have a bit of an advantage when it comes to run scoring possibilities. In addition to this advantage, home teams very often win a game by one run since as soon as the game enters the bottom of the ninth or extra innings, anything short of a home run will have them win by one run only.

What do these facts mean for sports bettors?

In reality it means that the road team often offers a better value when betting the run line than the home team. The road team is both more likely to win by 2 runs, and they are certainly more likely to lose by less than two runs than the home team is.

Obviously when Vegas sets the odds they factor these things into the lines to certain degree, but I believe they don’t factor it in as much as they have to simply because the public doesn’t understand run line betting as well as they should. In fact, run line analysis in the past has shown that 77.1 percent of road teams cover the -1.5 run line when they win, as opposed to 68.5 percent of home teams covering the run line when they win.

This doesn’t mean you should blindly bet on road teams when looking at run line betting, that isn’t at all the purpose of this article. The point here is for run line bettors to realize that it is helping your odds to find strategic times to take the side of the road team in run line bets, since much of the public fails to factor these important statistics into their decision making.

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