Dodgers to host Rockies in key divisional set

Baseball Betting Lines

05/07/2010 - (Sportsbook Betting Lines) - Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Andre Ethier will bring his Triple Crown numbers and late-game heroics into Friday's opener of a three- game series versus the NL West-rival Colorado Rockies at Chavez Ravine.

Ethier was at it again in last night's 7-3 victory over the Milwaukee Brewers, helping the Dodgers salvage the finale of a three-game set. After Los Angeles closer Jonathan Broxton blew his second save and spoil John Ely's bid for his first major league win, Ethier clubbed a LaTroy Hawkins offering over the wall in center field for a grand slam and the 11th walkoff hit of his young career.

"I want to go up there in that situation, I want to end the game right there," said Ethier, who cracked four game-winning homers a year ago. "[Hawkins] threw me a fastball right down the middle. I just put an easy swing on it and it just kept going."

The lefty is tied with Arizona's Kelly Johnson for the National League lead in homers (10) and leads the NL in average (.371) and RBI (30).

Ethier's hit made a winner out of Broxton, while Ely tossed 6 2/3 innings of one-run ball and struck out seven batters.

James Loney knocked in a run in his sixth straight game and Xavier Paul ended with two hits, two runs scored and an RBI for Los Angeles, which has won four of six and improved to 4-3 on a 10-game homestand.

Dodgers starter Hiroki Kuroda hopes to build off an impressive outing his last time out when he toes the rubber this evening. Kuroda beat Pittsburgh on Sunday with eight innings of one-run ball and lowered his earned run average from 2.36 to 2.08. The Japanese right-hander is 3-1 in five starts but winless in his career against the Rockies, having gone 0-2 with a 7.00 earned run average in three starts.

Los Angeles is 4-1 when Kuroda takes the mound this season.

Colorado, meanwhile, will continue a nine-game road trip Friday and has won three of its last four games. It took two of three matchups with San Diego and is coming off Wednesday's 6-5 victory in 12 innings thanks to Ian Stewart's solo home run in the top of the 12th.

Manuel Corpas tossed 2 2/3 scoreless frames of relief to post the win for the Rockies, who recorded their first road series victory of the season. Starter Aaron Cook lasted five innings, allowing five runs on six hits.

"We've had a couple of rough series on the road, so to get this win was big for us, (especially) against a really good team playing good baseball right now," Rockies second baseman Clint Barmes said on the team's website. "Hopefully this will boost us to play the way we know we're capable of playing."

Barmes went 3-for-5 with three runs batted in and a run scored for Colorado, which is 3-3 on the trek and got an RBI apiece from Seth Smith and Melvin Mora.

Esmil Rogers is scheduled to make his third career start tonight for the Rockies and lost his most recent outing in a 6-1 setback at San Francisco on Saturday. The Giants pounded Rogers for five runs, four of which were earned, and five hits in four innings.

The Dominican right-hander is 0-1 with a 5.63 ERA in four games (1 start) this season and has never faced the Dodgers.

Los Angeles owned Colorado last season to the tune of a 14-4 record, including victories in seven of nine games held in Hollywood. The Dodgers have also won four of the last five encounters in this series and are 24-12 in the past 36 meetings between the NL West inhabitants.

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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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