Cardinals start series in Atlanta

Baseball Betting Lines

09/09/2010 - (Sportsbook Betting Lines) - When St. Louis and Atlanta last met in April, the Cardinals ran away with a four-game sweep at Busch Stadium. They will attempt to do that again in the first of four consecutive matchups tonight from Turner Field.

The Cardinals had lost three in a row to Atlanta before sweeping a four-game series from April 26-29, and are currently fighting for their playoff lives. St. Louis dropped the final two portions of a three-game series at Milwaukee and suffered an 8-1 setback in Wednesday's finale, as starter Jaime Garcia was roughed up for seven runs and seven hits in four innings.

Albert Pujols ended with a team-best two hits, including a home run in the first inning, for the Cardinals, losers in 11 of their last 15 games. The Cards are still six games behind Cincinnati for the National League Central lead and sit 6 1/2 games off the pace in the wild card race.

"It was kind of a weird night for us," Cardinals manager Tony La Russa said. "We're getting shut down pretty regularly now."

La Russa's club is 1-2 on a seven-game road trip and has lost seven of its last eight contests as the visitor. Speaking of losses, Cardinals co-ace Adam Wainwright will try to stop a personal four-game losing streak when he takes the mound this evening. He had won three starts in a row before his recent slide and is coming off Saturday's 6-1 loss to the Reds in which he yielded five runs -- two earned -- and seven hits over five innings.

Wainwright fell to 17-10 in 29 starts to go along with a 2.34 ERA. The All- Star righty is also 6-8 in 15 starts away from Busch Stadium this season. He beat Atlanta during the four-game sweep on April 29, hurling six innings of three-run ball in a 10-4 victory. Wainwright is 5-0 with a 2.00 ERA in eight career matchups (5 starts) with the Braves.

Atlanta is hoping a return home will cure its recent woes, despite salvaging the finale of a three-game in Pittsburgh with Wednesday's 9-3 victory.

Derek Lowe has won all 10 of his career starts against the Pirates after he held the hosts to just a run on eight hits in six innings. Lowe also had a hit and two runs scored, while Martin Prado, Derrek Lee and Alex Gonzalez each drove in a pair of runs for the current wild card-leading Braves, who had lost three straight and five of six games before the six-run triumph.

"I felt good," Lowe said. "There was never any issue of any pain and the game pretty much came down to one pitch in the first inning. We got three runs and they came back and loaded the bases, and it came down to the pitch to Ryan Doumit and I was able to make it and then we just kept piling on."

The Braves' recent slump allowed Philadelphia to take back the top spot in the NL East, as the Phillies hold a half-game lead over Atlanta for division bragging rights. Atlanta is two games in front of San Francisco for the final postseason berth in the Senior Circuit.

Atlanta will also host Washington for three games in Dixie and is an impressive 49-19 at Turner Field this season. It will send Jair Jurrjens to the mound Thursday and he's 4-0 with a 3.38 ERA in his last seven starts. He threw seven shutout innings and gave up three hits in Saturday's 2-0 win at Florida, improving to 7-4 in 18 outings this season.

Jurrjens lost to the Cardinals in late April and is 1-3 with a 3.27 ERA in four career starts against them. The right-hander, however, will put his 6-0 home record on the line tonight.

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Sportsbook Betting Lines

Who Makes the Sportsbook Betting Lines?

Las Vegas Sports Consultants (LVSC) is the world’s premier oddsmaking company and the most respected authority on making the lines. Mike Seba is a Senior Oddsmaker at LVSC and has been making lines for the last six years. In our extended interview, Seba explained that there are 4-5 oddsmakers assigned to make lines for each of the major sports (pro & college football and basketball; MLB, NHL, boxing, golf). Each of these oddsmakers bring unique opinions, strengths and weaknesses to the process. Oddsmakers at LVSC are professional sports junkies who love what they do and would probably do it for nothing if you asked them, but they do get paid for it. By necessity their approach is very research-oriented and concise, since with millions of dollars at risk there is little margin for error.

“You either have a passion for it or you don’t,” Seba said.

“The #1 thing for us is to make a line for each game that creates good two-way action. We do this by drawing from past experiences and applying them to current situations. People think it’s much more complicated, but it’s not. “

What are the Football Betting Lines Trying to Accomplish?

There is a common misconception that point spreads represent the oddsmakers’ prediction of how many points the favorite will win by. That is not the case at all – their intent is NOT to evenly split the ATS result between the teams; rather, their goal is to attract equal betting action on both sides. Stated another way, they want to create a line that half the people find appealing to bet one way while the other half find it appealing to bet the other way (known as ‘dividing the action’).

Divided action means the sportsbook is guaranteed a profit on the game because of the fee charged to the bettor (called juice or vig – typically $11 bet to win $10).

How the Opening Line Is Made

The opening line is the first line created by the oddsmakers, which is then sent out to sportsbooks. Of course there is an entire method to the madness on how the opening line is created. Seba explained that it all starts with each oddsmaker creating a line on each game based upon their own personal approach. This usually includes having up-to-date power ratings on each team.

Power ratings are the oddsmaker’s value of each team and are used as a guide to calculate a "preliminary" pointspread on an upcoming game. The power ratings are adjusted after each game a team plays. Examples of non-game factors that would require an adjustment to a team's power rating are key player injuries and player trades.

Once a game’s power rating based pointspread is determined, the oddsmaker will make adjustments to that line after considering each team's most recent games played and previous games played against that opponent. Also, adjustments are made after reading each team’s local newspapers to get a sense of what the coaches & players are thinking going into the game.

Since the oddsmaker’s ultimate goal is equally dividing the sports betting action, public perception and sportsbook betting patterns must be taken into account. For example, the public might have heavy betting interest week after week on a popular college football betting team such as USC. If an oddsmaker comes up with a preliminary line of USC -7, then an adjustment up to -7.5 or -8 would be made in response to the public’s expected USC bias.

The last step in the line-making process for each oddsmaker is taking one final look to determine whether or not the line "feels right." This is where common sense and past experience with how games are bet enters into the picture.

A round-table discussion among the 4-5 oddsmakers involved in making the line for each sport is then conducted and a consensus line is decided upon by the Odds Director before it is released to the sportsbooks. Of the 4-5 oddsmakers, generally the 2 most respected opinions are weighed more heavily by the Odds Director before he decides on the final line.

Why Sports Betting Lines Change

Once the opening line is released by LVSC, the individual sportsbooks decide if they want to make any adjustments before offering it to the public. Reasons for such adjustments include:

Experts working for the individual books having a strong opinion on the game

Individual books having players who consistently bet with certain tendencies (such as an extreme bias toward favorites or toward a certain popular team like USC)

The purpose of these adjustments, like all line adjustments, is to more equally divide the betting action.

Once betting begins, sportsbooks can adjust the line at any time. In doing so they attempt to make more attractive the team that is getting less action. By moving the line, sportsbooks can influence how the public bets on a particular game.

For example, if the pointspread on a game is 7 and most of the money is coming in on the underdog (taking the +7), sportsbooks will then move the number down to 6 ½ to try and attract money on the favorite.

Moving the line is the oddsmaker's effort to balance betting action, and often times such moves can have a major impact on a bettor’s decision. Oddsmakers can also change the line depending on various event-related factors such as player injuries or weather. Obviously, if the line comes out a week ahead of the event (which is the case in football), there is much that could happen during the week leading up to the event that could affect the line. Oddsmakers have to determine if any changes are necessary and send out an "adjusted line."

“The main objective is that our clients get equal action on both sides,” Seba said. “We’re not trying to pick the team that covers the spread, we’re trying to make it a coin flip, a tough decision (for the bettor). If we’ve done that, we’ve done our job.”

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