A bet on the “money line” is simply a bet on a team winning the game, regardless of the score. The lower the money line, the stronger that team is favored to win. In this example, Miami has a money line of 110, and their opponent, Cincinnati, has a money line of -130, making Cincinnati the money line favorite.

As the strength of the money line increases, so do the chances of covering:

The money line favorite covers 58.3% of the time:

The stronger the money line, the larger the average margin of victory:

Game total, or over/under, is the line for the number of runs scored by both teams in a game. In this example the total is 8. Each side (over or under) of a total is also assigned odds. Here, a bet on the under is favored, so you would need to bet $120 on the under to win $100.

The correlation between the game total odds and the chances of covering are not particularly strong:

The total favorite covers 48.4% of the time, with under favorites slightly outperforming over favorites 49.6% to 48.1%:

The average difference between the game total and the actual runs scored is shown by the blue bars. The red lines show the standard deviation of that difference.

Run lines are the baseball version of a point spread. The spread is always 1.5 runs, meaning the favorite must win by two or more runs to cover the spread, or the underdog must lose by one run or win the game outright to cover the spread. In this example, Houston is the run line favorite (-1.5). However, they are not a favorite to cover the 1.5 points, with run line odds of 120. A $100 bet on Houston as a run line favorite would win $120 if Houston wins by at least 2 runs.

As the strength of run line odds increases, so do the chances of covering:

The run line odds favorite covers 58.8% of the time. Run line underdogs outperform favorites both as run line odds favorites (59.5% vs 54.2%) and run line odds underdogs (45.8% vs 40.5%):

This plot shows run differential by run line odds. Blue dots above the first dotted line and red dots in between the dotted lines represent covers.

Summary Table

The overall results from my analysis are summarized here. Run line odds favorites and money line favorites cover over 58% of the time, with teams favored to cover as run line dogs performing the best, covering 59.5% of the time The softest lines for sports bettors according to this data are the odds associated with the total. Although game total does correlate well with actual total runs, the large amount of variance leads to relatively weaker performance by the side favored on over/under bets. FantasyAce should focus on run line odds and money lines for their predictive value when building player projections and models while focusing on over/under lines for identifying inefficiencies leading to profitable wagering opportunities.

Odds Summary Tables