Handicappers and the average sports enthusiast are very familiar with the spread in football and basketball.
All gamblers need to do is pick a favorite if they believe they can win by more than the spread or pick an underdog they feel can either win the game or lose by less than the spread.
This is intuitive.
Most gamblers cannot grasp baseball betting as easily because it uses the money line.
When gamblers choose either the favorite or the underdog, the gambler has to choose the team based on who they believe can win at a higher percentage than the break even percentage of the odds.
For example, if a favorite is -150, you would lose $150 if they lost but win $100 if they win.
You could say that you would lose $300 if you bet on them and lost twice but win $300 if you bet on them thrice and win thrice.
So for every two losses you would need to win three times to break even.
So every five times that you make the bet, you would have to win three of them, that is a 60% win percentage.
But how does one determine whether or not a team has a 60% chance of winning? The only way a person can do so is for them to look at past results and make a guess as to how teams tend to do under certain circumstances.
These would be called following betting systems for baseball.
Baseball systems are much more successful with betting on baseball than it is with other sports because when a sport uses the spread, the sportsbooks can easily move te number around to compensate for any system that goes for or against any team.