Pitching Statistics to Help You Handicap Baseball Games

When handicapping baseball games, there’s no position more important than the pitchers. There are dozens of statistics that try to gauge pitcher performance, but some stats are better at predicting future results than others and that’s what we’re going to look at today. When formulating your MLB picks tonight, look at these pitching statistics:

WHIP

WHIP stands for Walks and Hits Per Inning Pitched and is one of the most commonly used stats to evaluate pitcher performance. One flaw with the WHIP stat is that it doesn’t consider how hitters get on base. However, the best pitchers often lead the league annually in WHIP.

K/9

This stats measures how many strikeouts a pitcher averages per nine innings. As a pitcher you want to strikeout the other guys, but that’s not easy in MLB. The top K/9 pitchers are often among the leaders in wins. If you’re backing a team, you want a pitcher with a high K/9 rate.

Walk Rate (BB%)

The last thing you want to do as a pitcher is walk batters. Having runners on base is never ideal and when a pitcher has a high walk rate, they’re setting themselves up for disaster.

Quality Start

What qualifies as a quality start? A pitcher needs to go six full innings and allow three or fewer runs. I love this stats, a pitcher with a lot of quality starts is keeping his team in games at the very least and should be winning a lot if he’s getting even mediocre run support.

ERA+

Adjusted earn run average can be a helpful statistic to look at. Sometimes a pitchers ERA can be inflated due park factors or the opponents they’re playing against. ERA+ aims to normalize ERA by accounting for external factors. The formula is league ERA adjusted for park factors * 100 / ERA.

These are five statistics I recommend tracking throughout the season. You can find the latest stats on every pitcher at the ScoresAndStats.com (SAS) MLB platform. 

When handicapping the pitchers in a match-up, you also want to look at the pitcher career splits against the opposition. Some pitchers dominate certain hitters and vice versa.

A pitcher may have great numbers on the season, but if he historically struggles against a certain team, you need to consider that before betting on that team, the stats don’t tell you everything.

Plus, you have to consider how the pitcher has accumulated his numbers. Has he played against weak opposition? Did the pitcher have one bad game that skewed his numbers?

Free MLB Predictions

I know not everyone will have time to handicap MLB games. It takes a look of work and you need to source various statistics, trends and other betting data to have a chance at winning long-term.

Alternatively, you can check out GameAdvisers.com, which is a new sharp/system betting platform featuring some of the best MLB handicappers in the business. You won’t find the picks from these handicappers anywhere else and right now they’re offering free accounts to newcomers.

To conclude, pitching is the most important position in baseball, when you’re betting on MLB, the pitching position is the one to focus on when handicapping match-ups.