As the World Series comes to a close, we face months in the baseballing wilderness. In this cold lonely time, US sportsbooks will be hunkered down preparing for one of the biggest opportunities yet; the 2020 MLB season.
Online sports betting was legalised at a national level in 2018. However, this left each state to decided whether they would allow sports betting within their borders. This meant that sportsbooks in the US only began to appear online in 2019. As the 2019 MLB season began there were only a few US sportsbooks up and running online.
This means that very few sportsbooks have had the opportunity to really make the most of the MLB. This won’t be the case come 2020! Now there is a long list of sportsbooks in New Jersey as well as Pennsylvania and Indiana and they will be ready to take full advantage of one of the nation’s most popular sports.
Baseball is one of the most interesting sports to bet on. It requires a high level of knowledge and it is very technical which makes it a perfect fit for analytical bettors. External factors have a huge influence over a game, which fits with in-play betting, which is extremely popular in the US.
The MLB, with 160 games played by each club – excluding playoffs – makes it the perfect league for sportsbooks. All in all the MLB and sports betting is a match made in heaven.
The unique nature of baseball means that you need a specific set of attributes when looking for the perfect MLB sportsbooks. This includes a sportsbook that offers baseball-specific bets such as 5-inning lines and runlines.
You will also need a sportsbook which has enough data to satisfy all your data needs for betting on the MLB. The amount of data needed for baseball betting puts the sportsbook with a background in fantasy sports at an advantage.
This puts both DraftKings and FanDuel as two of the best options for betting on the MLB. The amount of data these two operators have had to process to run fantasy sports lends itself very kindly to their sportsbook offering.
The MLB has partnered with playMGM which means that they have access to information and statistics that other sportsbooks do not. It also means they have focused slightly more on the MLB than other Major Leagues. This also means more in-play MLB betting, as that requires a lot of live data.