One of the things we mentioned in a note on baseball last week was our “totals only” baseball service here at Strategic Sports Publishing. Over/unders are the only way we attack baseball, and our “Baseball Guy” continues to have a great year, now sitting at 58-33 (64.7%) on the season as documented by The Sports Monitor. This week we’re ranked #1 in the industry in the all-important “one-star compare”, which offers a comparison of net units assuming the same amount bet on any play, which is the way we approach things.

Those details about our baseball spurred some questions. Let’s cover the answers for you.

Q. Is your baseball totals handicapper (name removed)?

A. No. My baseball guy is not a public handicapper. He is a close friend of mine who I’ve known since about two weeks after I started publishing sports handicapping material via my first book in 1996. For years now he has handicapped the sport of baseball exclusively and privately for us and us only. He has no other connection with any other service.

Q. As a client, I’ve noticed another service using an awful lot of your baseball guy’s plays. Does he handicap for (name removed)?

A. No, he doesn’t, but his picks do seem to influence some others greatly, don’t they? Our clients retain an advantage, however, as we often influence the line in the first hour after release (9AM Eastern Time). So our clients get these games at better lines than anyone else. I’ve also noticed that our All Sports VIP service is less than the service of others who seem to be…ahem…”influenced” by our Baseball Guy’s plays. So if you want them at the best lines and cost effectively, contact us directly.

Q. Why don’t you play sides?

A. We did play baseball sides for two years, but our profit was tremendous in totals and the sides were not nearly as profitable. Focusing on just totals for the past several years streamlines his workload and enhances his focus. The results speak for themselves.

Q. How do your current customers react to things like your “rest of May free” promotion if they didn’t get a couple of free weeks when they signed up?

A. Our customers have done well with our service and the last thing they’re going to be concerned with is whether or not someone is getting in $100 cheaper than they did. Strategic Sports Publishing is a “long-term relationship” business and not a “buy today’s big winner” outfit. Customers have no problem with us occasionally reaching out to forge new relationships.

Our “rest of May free” promotion continues. Call 1-770-649-1078 for more information. Please leave a message if you get voice mail, as I’m splitting my time between football research and enjoying myself following a productive basketball campaign and I’m not always by the office phone.

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This is the story about an obscure baseball betting rule, Congress, the resurgence of local bookies, and why it is more important than ever before to understand the betting rules of the sports that you wager on.

I have a guy who handicaps baseball for my customers (totals only, no sides) and he does an excellent job, winning every week this season so far with just about 15 net winners after juice at this point. He called me one night last week to chat. As I wasn’t following the scores, I asked him how we were doing that night.

He was worried about our under in the Twins/ChiSox game, which had gone into extras after being 2-2 in regulation. The game was in the 12th inning with the score 3-3, but was in a rain delay. While we chatted, the game was suspended. “What happens now?” I asked.

He was pretty sure that the ruling would be that the total would stand, but not 100% certain, as it was such a rare situation for a game to rained out while tied in extra innings. Sure enough, a check of the rules and regulations for baseball betting confirmed that we would be credited with a winner.

Here’s the rule. “The following applies for over/under and run line wagering. If a game is called or suspended in extra innings, the score will be determined after the last full inning unless the home team scores to tie, or takes the lead in the bottom half of the inning, in which case the score is determined at the point of the game being called.”

So in this instance, since the score had been 3-3 at the end of the 11th, the winner was the under (as well as +1.5 for run line players). Those who played either the Twins or White Sox would have their wager refunded as “no action”.

But with so many bettors once again playing with local bookies, would bettors playing with Jimmy or Tony (those first names combine to make up over 40% of all local bookes) be properly credited with the win?

Being aware of the rules is more important than ever. Congressional legislation getting in the way of banking relationships between offshore wagering entities and American banks has led to a resurgence of local bookies to fill the void. Bookmakers coast-to-coast who had left the business, or were on the verge of leaving the business, are now serving their local bettors in large numbers once again.

While a legit, reputable, offshore sports book will know how to grade something in unique circumstances, some locals are ignorant of when a game is official for betting purposes and when it a bet is to be “no action”. Other local bookies may understand the rules, but are simply not predisposed to giving the bettor a fair shake unless he asserts himself.

So bettors should always be on top of their daily results, and that is doubly true if they are back to dealing with local bookies, as so many are these days.

Getting back to my baseball guy, after winning his only Thursday play we are now 46-28 (62%+) on the season with our Strategic Sports Publishing over/unders (as documented by The Sports Monitor). The record is even a little better than that for some of us. Why? The plays are released by 9AM EDT every morning, and playing early has many of us with a slightly better record than the current documented mark.

If you’re interested in following these powerful over/under selections you can take advantage of a tremendous offer. Get the rest of May at no charge when you sign up for our month-to-month All Sports VIP service. Call 1-770-649-1078 for details.

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Can you believe baseball is starting? Our baseball totals, especially early, carry a confidence level as high as anything else we do. I don’t handicap hardball myself, but have a guy who does it for me. I’ve known him for 12 years and have always followed his baseball. We figured out a few years ago that his totals were extraordinary and sides just above average. So we’ve been focusing on these very strong totals for years now.

Annually, he starts the campaign ahead of the linemaker, including starts of 13-1, 53-29, and 18-7. Last year his start wasn’t as blistering, but we still finished up double-digit units on the season. And when I refer to units, I’m talking about one unit per play, no phony “unit padding” or “multiple star” plays.

Why does our baseball guy get off to such hot starts? He handicaps only baseball totals. Nothing else. No football, baskets, horses, hockey, or tiddly winks.

Why is he so far ahead of the linemaker? He has his own ratings systems and formulas. He does a lot of work in every aspect of the game that influences scoring. He knows a lot of people who follow baseball closely and uses this network to ascertain the true health of pitchers through the long season.

He also does a lot of work on groundball/flyball, power/finesse, and other profiling of pitching style analysis. He does this for every pitcher in the league. He also knows how every hitter fits these metrics. He knows what key players can’t hit groundball pitchers. He knows what pitchers get pounded by teams that hit “finesse” pitching better than guys who throw hard. He knows about the middle relievers, the setup men, the closers, and how teams hit these guys.

He has tremendous contacts at the pinnacle of the Bill James style “Moneyball” form of analysis who respect his work immensely. He is often ahead of the curve on things because of that. He also studies the ballparks and how they influence hitters at different times of the year.

Here’s what you get with our “totals only” baseball service.

• An average of two plays per day in recent years. He’s not hungry for action, though he has a lot of action early most years. He’ll pass some days.
• All plays released by 10AM EDT via a toll-free recorded voice mail with your own personal code. Call and act on the information at your convenience.
• Annual strong starts, this is not a “see how he does and maybe jump on” service. If you want good info on hardball totals, act now.

You can’t buy these plays by the day or by the week. I’ll let others hype up “games of the month” and “big play specials.” We have a seasonal plan and a flexible month-t0-month plan, with no daily or weekly sales either online or off. Instead of thinking up promotions, he’s analyzing pitchers, hitters, ballparks, and everything that goes along with succeeding in baseball.

He passed Monday, but if you’re interested in getting going with the likely first selections on Tuesday, call me in the office at 770-649-1078. If I don’t answer leave a message and I’ll call you back personally (no salespeople employed here).

I believe strongly that our “totals only” baseball plan is one of the best opportunities out there. Call 1-770-649-1078 for any questions you may have.

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Here’s another 25 items of interest to those who don’t mind placing a wager or two on the games they enjoy.

1. First downs aren’t the most valuable stat in football, but they can tell you a lot about a team’s ability to sustain offense. In an average performance an NFL team will get 18 or 19 first downs in a game. A look at some first down numbers show some abominable offensive performances last weekend. Five NFL teams had 11 first downs or less. The Vikings had 11 yet somehow managed to beat the Niners. The Rams, Raiders, and Panthers had 10 each in losing by a combined 94-23. The Chiefs were held to a putrid 7 first downs in their 41-7 shellacking at the hands of the Broncos.
2. So what did these clubs have in common? They were all on the road. But more importantly, their starting quarterbacks were Tarvaris Jackson, Brock Berlin, Josh McCown, Vinny Testaverde, and Brodie Croyle. There is simply a dearth of quality quarterbacks in the NFL.
3. The fact that the pass-first quarterback is not exactly the rage in college football isn’t going to do anything to feed better young quarterbacks into the league.
4. In a not-unrelated note, favorites went 12-4 in the NFL last weekend.
5. For a while it looked like Jack Pardee was going to get hired to replace Art Briles (moved on to Baylor) at Houston. And they were serious. Briles will turn 72 during spring practice.
6. Neither of the two “finalists” in the article on Pardee was hired. Instead the Cougar job goes to Oklahoma co-offensive coordinator Kevin Sumlin, who becomes the eighth minority coach in Division 1-A football.
7. While still calling them Breeders’ Cup races, Friday appears to becoming the Cup’s version of the Busch Series. Was there that big of a need for a race for two-year old turf fillies? A mile-and-a-half dirt marathon? Not that I mind having more races to bet on, but there’s some dilution of the title “Breeders’ Cup Champion”, isn’t there?
8. Clemens? Of course. Tejada? Obviously. But I wouldn’t have taken 200-1 odds that Hal Morris would have been on that list. Hal Morris had 76 home runs in 3,998 career at bats. It would be a challenge to find a first baseman who played 10+ years in the majors with lower power numbers than Hal Morris. I guess there’s juicing and then there’s juicing correctly.
9. Still no test for HGH in MLB.
10. It is easy to forget exactly how quiet “exam week” is in college basketball. Including the “added” board, there are only 18 total bettable games from Monday through Friday in all of college hoops.
11. My Strategic Sports Publishing basketball selection service is off to another great start this season. We’re hitting over 60% in both college (65.7%) and pro (61.5%) hoops. Since the start of last season in the Sports Monitor’s regular season college basketball rankings we’ve notched a 113-64 (64.5%) mark. For information on this service, call 1-770-649-1078 for rates and details.
12. The vast majority of our college hoops plays are sides, but you may have noticed that college totals are going up later and later, at lower and lower limits, and are moving quicker and quicker?
13. The International Olympic Committee considers illegal gambling to be a significant threat and is eager to work with legal wagering firms in an effort to track the action on Olympic sports. The IOC understands that the paper trail that legal, licensed wagering provides is essential.
14. Yet here in the US, street bookies are once again flourishing due to Bill Frist’s ill-conceived legislation from last fall.
15. Of course offshore and online sports books really aren’t doing that badly, and it isn’t nearly as difficult to withdraw and collect as the media suggests.
16. We’ve been telling you for months now how important the Antigua vs. US case is in front of the World Trade Organization. It looks like a decision may be imminent in the online gambling dispute.
17. Southern Miss hired Larry Fedora as their new head coach. A tip of the hat to Fedora, the former Oklahoma State offensive coordinator.
18. Sorry, I couldn’t resist. I actually stole that line from Marc Lawrence, who used it while I was guesting on his radio show.
19. The “calling of the hogs” was the most entertaining part of the Bobby Petrino press conference, but the lack of challenging questions from the “reporters” in Arkansas was the most striking. Tony Barnhart has a few that could have been asked had the sports media in Fayeteville not been so compliant.
20. Petrino’s old boss, Tom Jurich, the AD at Louisville, says that his former coach is now “five for five”, actively looking for a new job each of the past five seasons. That’s just one of the nuggets in Pat Forde’s terrific takedown of Petrino.
21. There are some bad actors on the Falcons, but Warrick Dunn and Joey Harrington, good soldiers throughout a difficult year, offer some illuminating examples of Petrino as a guy who was completely overmatched.
22. Petrino overshadowed a couple of other coaching moves in the SEC this week. A couple of years ago Al Borges was the toast of the town in Auburn, Alabama. But the offensive coordinator was let go by Tommy Tuberville this week.
23. After not capturing the Southern Miss job, Tyrone Nix becomes the defensive coordinator at Ole’ Miss for Houston Nutt. It is a lateral move in title, but a $100,000 raise for Nix. Steve Spurrier might not mind Nix’s departure after the injury-fueled late season collapse by his defense.
24. Handicappers Matty Baiungo and Erik Scheponik share a well-done and successful free selection phone. Call this 24-hour voice mail broadcast at 1-404-250-7555 for solid winning information. I’m a contributor on a similar effort at 1-770-618-8700.
25. Back next week with a bowl-heavy effort. Have a great weekend.

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25 observations on, football (mostly), baseball, horse racing, and the sports betting world.

1. LSU is a tremendous team, with their only loss being on the road in overtime despite playing 5 teams currently 22nd or higher in the BCS rankings. The Tigers outgain opponents by over 200 yards per game on average. Yet they’ve failed to cover five in a row. The lesson? Beware September’s undisputed champion, as the pointspread is a great equalizer.

2. In taking on Virginia Tech, South Carolina, Florida, Kentucky, and Auburn, LSU has played five teams tougher than any individual opponent that undefeated Ohio State, Boston College, Kansas, Arizona State, and Hawaii have faced prior to this week. BC/Virginia Tech and Cal/Arizona State change that this weekend.

3. College scoring has skewed downward in recent weeks. Overs were rolling with the new rules early, but in conference play, with the great familiarity between opponents, scoring has lessened considerably. In fact, there have now been more unders than overs on the season, despite the big tear that over bettors enjoyed early.

4. CBS’s Spencer Tillman takes a break from predicting that all the Top 10 teams will win easily to talk about the how the Generation Y athlete needs to be motivated differently than their predecessors were.

5. Matt Forte of Tulane is a prime candidate for our annual Deonce Whitaker Award. Whitaker used to put up sick numbers at San Jose State with nobody noticing, and Forte is doing the same. After going for 342 yards on 38 carries at SMU on Saturday, Forte now has an incredible 753 yards rushing in his last three games.

6. Forte’s production is greatly enhanced by playing in Conference USA. Of the 12 teams allowing the most yards per game in 1A college football, 6 of them are CUSA entrants.

7. If you lost track of them after Stanford’s cataclysmic win over Southern Cal as 41-point underdogs, the Cardinal pulled off a win as a double digit dog in Tucson last week. As bad as they’ve been the past few years, Stanford is 9-3 as a road dog since the departure of Buddy Teevens.

8. It is every worse than you think it is at Nebraska. The 4-4 Huskers have been outgained in every single game since their opening win over Nevada. In the last three weeks they’ve been outscored by 88 points and outgained by 579 yards. Despite all this, coach Bill Callahan claims to be doing “an excellent job in every area.”

9. The losing leaves some Nebraska fans pleased, as at least it has them closer to a new coach.

10. Nick Saban thoroughly outcoached Phil Fulmer Saturday. Despite losing 5 players due to a surprise suspension involving textbook sales, Bama jumped the Vols early, opening with an onside kick that led to a field goal. The subsequent Bama TD drive was aided by a 4^th down offside call as Alabama motion confused Tennessee. A 3^rd down incomplete pass was canceled out by a Tennessee roughing the passer violation. And that was just the beginning. Folks in Miami don’t have much to say about him, but at this level he sure can coach.

11. Georgia people are yapping that even though they get half the tickets, Jacksonville isn’t a neutral site for the annual battle between Bulldogs and Gators. Funny, you don’t hear Oklahoma people whining about Dallas being favorable to the Longhorns, do you?

12. It was pretty remarkable to have the opportunity to get better than 2-1 odds in the World Series on a team that had won 21 of 22 games, but Game 1 of the Series showed that maybe the oddsmakers knew what they were doing. The Rockies couldn’t have looked any rustier off of their 8-day layoff.

13. The flow of the postseason was really damaged by the unnatural made-for-TV off days. In addition, it is terribly late to just be staring the Fall Classic. The 1975 World Series that the Red Sox lost to the Reds went seven games, had three rainouts between Games 6 and 7, and still wrapped up on October 22nd. This year’s didn’t even start until October 24th.

14. Sunday night in the NFL we saw how a bye week can completely interrupt a team’s flow. The Steelers were rolling into their off week while the Broncos were wheezing. The bye week proved to be momentum-interruptus, as Pittsburgh’s superior stats meant nothing. It was a victory for situational handicapping over matchup edges.

15. At -17, the Patriots were the biggest road favorite since a the 1987 player’s strike, when the replacement Niners were favored at the replacement Falcons by 23.5. The only time this year they’ll possibly threaten that is their game at the Bills. Games at the Colts, the Ravens, and the Giants will be much more competitively priced.

16. Will the Pats go undefeated? Obviously the game at Indy on November 4th is a huge stumbling block. But the season-ending Saturday game at the Giants is interesting. A win in Indy and chances are good that New England will have nothing to play for that final week of the campaign. Meanwhile, in a competitive division there’s every chance that it will be a critically important game for the Giants, who are a Wembley Stadium win over 0-7 Miami away from hitting their bye week with a 6-2 mark.

17. Trying to get Bill Belichick’s goat is becoming a cottage industry in the media. In the post game press conference, Sal Paolentonio was accusing him of running up the score at the same moment that the Texans took the lead after trailing by 25 in the fourth quarter. For the record, Belichick initially replaced Brady with Matt Cassel on the Patriots’ second drive of the second half.

18. Joey Porter has been a big-money free agent bust for the Dolphins. And finally taking a taste of success he wasn’t going to let the fact his club was getting blown out interfere with his personal histrionics. After picking up his first sack of the season in the second quarter he did the “kick the dirt” sack dance he believes that he was known for in Pittsburgh. On the next play a Tom Brady TD pass to Randy Moss made the score 35-7. Nice touch by Porter, however, to donate $5,000 to a youth basketball team for “at risk” kids.

19. Keyshawn Johnson was pretty tough with his cousin Chad Johnson in their “Sunday Conversation” on ESPN. It was a refreshing change from the enabling that Michael Irvin used to do in the same slot. Folks in Tampa Bay would probably have liked to see today’s Keyshawn Johnson interview the Keyshawn Johnson who was such a cancer on the Bucs that they paid him to stay away from the team late in the 2003 season.

20. Vikings Coach Brad Childress doesn’t seem to be the best in-game strategy guy in the league. He made a horrid decision to challenge a call in the third quarter in Dallas. Marion Barber scored on a 1-yard TD run to pull the Cowboys to within an extra point of a 14-all tie. Though the immediate replays showed that it was a definite touchdown. Childress tossed the challenge flag before he could even hear from his coaches in the booth. A challenge and a timeout, both wasted.

21. You horse guys shouldn’t have some of the problems you had in the Triple Crown getting horse bets down, as the account wagering rivalries seem to have settled down just a bit, with every major player accepting Breeders Cup bets as a result.

22. And it is never a bad idea to check in with Andy Beyer on a big racing day.

23. Our horse handicapper Dan Branham is offering his Breeders Cup selections for $79. Call my office at 1-770-649-1078 to sign up.

24. Who knew? Betting action points on rugby is big in South Africa, where the government may abolish taxes on sports betting next year. .

25. The Breeders Cup is great, but obviously our focus remains on football. My weekly newsletter The Max has 12 thoroughly researched pointspread selections. You get The Max delivered to your inbox every Monday night through the Super Bowl for only $89. For further details or to have your questions answered call 1-770-649-1078.

Thanks for reading. Good luck this weekend, and be careful.

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