I don't often review books that have been out of print for over a decade, but when the subject of baseball sports betting books comes up, Mike Lee's opus never fails to elicit multiple recommendations. Does it live up to its grandiose reputation, even a quarter century after its initial release? This review will address this question.
The book is divided into four parts, one for each stop on the base paths. The first covers the basics, including conversions between the baseball prices books print on the board with game odds and expected win percentage, along with some introductory suggestions for profitable angles. I have no idea if these angles work more than 25 years later, but many of them have transformed into common wisdom about baseball betting.
The problem I have with Lee's approach, and it's my biggest complaint with the book as a whole, is that much of his advice is based on betting teams given their results in previous games without much regard to those teams prices in the present game. All smart sports bettors know that there's no such thing as a bad bet, just a bad price. Similarly, any good trend can be priced as a bad bet if books make sharp adjustments. However, without some knowledge of what the fundamental price on a team ought to be, we can't know whether the results of any given angle have been factored into the line.
Part two covers several additional angles, including the benefit of betting home dogs and the recommendation of betting low-priced home favorites who have won at least three straight. According to my records, home dogs are still a better than average bet, although I don't think this is nearly as true today as it was at the time Lee wrote this book. As for betting on a team after three straight wins, this is an interesting notion, but I have a real problem with blindly betting this without taking into account the pitching match-up. If game four of this trend features an emergency start for a decent home team as a -160 favorite against another strong team's ace, I have a hard time believing that this would be a good bet.
Lee also discusses betting on or off teams that are on the verge of a series sweep as well as the implications of betting the second bill of a double-header. The author's insights are interesting, but I would have to recommend that bettors run these angles against a more recent sample of games before pursuing them too zealously.
Lee waits until Part 3 to address the issues surrounding pitching, which seems awfully odd to me. Lee seems chagrined that book lines are influenced so strongly by the quality of starting pitching, especially since they often play a little more than half the game. I find this position to be shocking, especially considering that while statisticians differ as to exactly how much of game outcomes is due to starting pitching, nearly everyone agrees that it accounts for at least 25% of a team's performance on any given day, and that's a huge chunk.
The author does have interesting things to say about the same pitchers facing each other in subsequent games, the effects of layoffs, and pitches who are making their first starts of the season. It should go without saying that any enterprising bettor should ensure that these angles still work in today's game before betting them. For example, I'm not at all sure that the expansion of baseball since the early 1980s hasn't diluted pitching enough that mid-season call-ups starting for the first time may not be as good a bargain as they once were.
Lee concludes the book with some "putting it all together" ideas, including some proportional betting ideas that seem entirely reasonable to me. I have some quibbles, but these recommendations are a breath of fresh air in a genre that consistently gets this facet wrong. He also provides a run-through of a slate of games, showing how he puts together all the ideas he has presented in the book into a coherent betting strategy. Again, to the extent that his recommendations still make for good bets, this is a very useful exercise.
Even after all this time, Bill Lee's Betting the Bases still contains enough good ideas about baseball betting to make it worth reading for those with an interest in this aspect of gambling. However, I do not believe that Lee's maxims are a recipe for automatic success. The baseball betting world is well aware of what he wrote a generation ago, and the sands of the game have shifted significantly over the years. Moreover, the author's emphasis on angles rather than fundamental analysis requires a lot of effort to ensure that yesterday's winning plays are still applicable today.
So, after all this I have to conclude that Mike Lee's classic is still worth reading today, but I don't believe it deserves the lofty praise that many still give to it. Further, to the extent that it is still worth reading, this is the case only because the book's peers are so moribund by comparison. Baseball bettors will probably benefit from tracking down a copy, but I certainly wouldn't make Betting the Bases the cornerstone of my baseball betting strategy.
Despite the time that has passed since it's initial publication, Betting the Bases is widely considered a sports betting classic. I still find it to be worth reading, but it's emphasis on betting angles with little regard to price makes me concerned that the only way bettors will know that these methods no longer work is after they have lost a substantial amount of money. So, it's worth reading by baseball bettors, but I'm not as enamored by it as many others are.
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