If you followed Game 6 of the World Series, you wouldn't have just seen an incredible game. You would have watched the odds change with just about every single pitch.  And that's not just hyperbole; the odds of one team or the other winning swung rapidly in ways that bookmakers somehow managed to quantify.

And sports betting, especially on baseball, just seems to continue to grow.  Billions are wagered every season on long-term bets, like which teams will make the World Series, to short-term bets, like will the fourth pitch of the next at bat be a ball, strike, foul or hit.  Thus the scrutiny not just by fans, but by sites like Sportsbook Casino is unbelievably intense as the game isn't just about winning or losing but about vast sums of money.

 

World Series 2011

Photo by Texas Military Forces, used under  creative commons license.

 

The analysis that these guys put into the game before it even happens, almost certainly with the help of the Elias Sports Bureau statistical databases, is staggering, and is probably more in depth than most baseball writers ever manage to get when analyzing a single game.

And that's a hard thing to say.  Most sportswriters make judgments on a team and on a game based on what they can see.  These preconceptions if wrong cost little, but for a sports betting group, each and every pitch can cost money and thus they have experts looking at each moment of every game, figuring, more often accurately than not the odds of the next moment played out on the field.

That's not saying they don't get it wrong, and certainly last night a lot of them predicting on the minute to minute matters of the eighth through 11th inning did, as the Rangers seemingly shut the door several times.

And that variability is one of the things that makes baseball great. Odds can be defied, teams mount monumental comebacks and lucky for us, the Cardinals gave us a game seven.

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