The Major League Baseball (MLB) regular season begins in April and runs through September, but the betting season for MLB picks begins much earlier. Opening lines on which teams will win their league pennants and face off on the World Series come out in November, before the infield clay has even dried on the cleats of the current season winners.

Early odds tend to be loose, and they tighten up quickly once the season begins. If you wager on your for the World Series in January, you could get 5:1 or 8:1 on a team that’s offered at 2:1 by mid-April. You can hedge by spreading your early bets among three or four top MLB picks, and then balance your action later in the season as the strengths and weaknesses of the teams become clear.

Florida is the early focus of . That’s where 16 of the 30 MLB clubs hold spring training. Preseason games present opportunities to get some MLB picks on the winners’ board, beginning in late February and running through March, right up to Opening Day in April.

Spring training records mean nothing, however, when 15 umpires call “play ball” for the MLB openers. Your attention and baseball picks should be focused entirely on pitching, as the hurlers have a significant advantage over batters in the first few weeks of the season. Look for low scoring games early on and choose your baseball picks accordingly. You can bet the runline on any game, predicting whether the combined number of runs scored by both teams will be over or under a certain total. Runlines are often expressed with half-points tacked on, to eliminate the possibility of ties.

With 16 teams in the National League and 14 in the American League, you have plenty of baseball picks to choose from each week. Initially, you may wish to concentrate your on one or more of the three divisions in each league, East, Central and West. Four of the six divisions have five teams each, while the NL Central has six teams and the AL West features only four. As the season goes on and your experience grows, you can expand your MLB picks to include more of each league.

To add a little spice to the season in May, interleague play takes place pitting NL teams against AL clubs, typically in cross-town battles such as Mets-Yankees and Cubs-White Sox. These games draw a lot of action from squares (recreational bettors). Unless you have some baseball picks you truly believe in, this is often a good time for sharps (professional handicappers) to pull back and watch from the bleachers. Save your bankroll for MLB picks in the bread and butter games of the summer.

The next milestone of the baseball picks season is the All-Star break in July. With so many pitching changes and so much unfamiliarity among opposing players, this can be a good time to lay low, too. Resume backing your MLB picks after the MVP has been announced. The risk of betting a lot on a single game isn’t worth the security you get by having multiple baseball picks in action on any regular season day.

Late in the season, streaks should be a focus of your MLB picks. Strong teams surge; weak ones give up and fall off. Betting against losers can be your strategy in September, as opposed to going for winning baseball picks.

Finally the league playoffs come, leading up to the World Series. By now your bankroll has grown, as has your insight into the surviving teams, and you can afford to wager more heavily on the few games remaining. In a best case scenario, your early baseball picks in January have arrived and are playing each other. You can’t lose. Then it all begins again, with a new year of MLB picks ahead.