Dodgers head home to face Giants

Baseball Betting Lines

07/19/2010 - (Sportsbook Betting Lines) - After getting swept in four games at St. Louis over the weekend, the Los Angeles Dodgers are back at home and will try to regroup in tonight's opener of a three-game set versus the NL West-rival San Francisco Giants at Chavez Ravine.

Pitching and scoring runs is what usually propels teams to victory. The Dodgers did none of that against the Cardinals, but did show signs of hope in a 5-4 loss Sunday afternoon at Busch Stadium. With the Dodgers clinging to a 4-3 lead in the bottom of the ninth, closer Jonathan Broxton gave up four hits and a pair of runs with two outs to absorb the loss. Allen Craig and Matt Holliday lifted the home team to victory with back-to-back RBI singles.

"I got myself in bad counts and walked guys," Broxton said.

Vicente Padilla started for LA and did his part with six shutout innings, while Travis Schlichting gave up two runs before Justin Miller permitted another in relief. Broxton then tossed the final 1 1/3 frames.

Matt Kemp, Garret Anderson and Padilla each drove in a run for the Dodgers, who are 5 1/2 games behind San Diego for bragging rights in the competitive National League West Division. Los Angeles will also host the New York Mets for four games on this residency.

The Dodgers are expected to call up right-handed pitcher James McDonald from Triple-A Albuquerque for tonight's start. McDonald is 6-1 with a 4.41 earned run average in 12 starts for the Isotopes this season and is expected to make his fifth career start tonight. In 45 games (4 starts) for LA last season, McDonald went 5-5 with a 4.00 ERA.

McDonald has faced San Francisco seven times in relief, going 0-0 with a 1.93 ERA over 9 1/3 innings of work.

Meanwhile, the Giants were aiming for their sixth straight win and a three- game sweep of the New York Mets before suffering a 4-3 setback in 10 innings on Sunday. Closer Brian Wilson gave up the go-ahead RBI double to Ike Davis in the top of the 10th and suffered the loss after the Giants failed to produce any runs in the home half.

Travis Ishikawa tied the game off Mets closer Francisco Rodriguez with a pinch-hit two-run single in the bottom of the ninth and Buster Posey knocked in the other run for the Giants, who lost for only the second time in 11 tries and fell 4 1/2 games off the lead in the NL West.

"This club's been resilient. We showed it last road trip and now we have to bounce back from this one," Giants manager Bruce Bochy said on the team's site. "This was a tough one. This is one we had and I feel for those guys because they battled hard. But we've got to be ready to go [Monday] and we know we have to play better in our division and put this behind us."

Jonathan Sanchez started for Bochy's club yesterday and did not record a decision for hurling seven innings of two-run ball. The Giants, who will host Arizona for four games by the Bay on this homestand, are expected to send young pitching prospect Madison Bumgarner to the mound Monday night.

Bumgarner is 2-2 with a 2.57 earned run average in four starts this season and has won back-to-back starts. In a 6-2 win at Washington the previous time out on July 11, he held the Nationals to one run on seven hits in six innings. The lefty faced the Dodgers once in relief during a 12-1 road loss on September 19 last season and struck out a pair of batters.

Los Angeles has won five of the first six matchups with San Francisco this season and is riding a four-game winning streak in the series. The Dodgers swept the Giants in three games by the Bay from June 28-30 and have won 11 of the past 15 meeting between the ballclubs.

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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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