Scoring, bullpen usage and league dominance all show certain patterns
MLB All-Star Game betting is its own ecosystem. It goes way beyond who the stronger team is on paper. Treating it like just another Tuesday night baseball game, like a Cubs-White Sox matchup, doesn’t work either. The Midsummer Classic has trends across scoring, league dominance, and bullpen usage patterns that are all worth paying attention to.
Scoring Trends in the MLB All-Star Game
It’s a different ballgame now.
Scoring in the MLB All-Star Game has dried up significantly compared with the slugfest rep of the 90s and early 2000s. Bonds, McGwire, Sosa – no matter what you think of their controversial careers, they made an imprint on the game by mashing all those years. People still carry that rep today.
There’s also the All-Star game stereotype that offense gets a free pass during the game. NBA and NHL All-Star games are notorious for their soft D; the NFL Pro Bowl (or what it used to be) was basically a game of touch football. Nobody wants to risk their season by going hard in a fun event that means nothing for their teams or their contracts. Same goes for MLB pitchers who might be reluctant to go all out for one night in July.
Weirdly enough though, double-digit combined scoring has become rare for the MLB All-Star Game. Since 2000, we’ve seen the AL and NL totals hit double-digits just three times.
Books have responded, of course. These days you’ll see MLB All-Star futures listing modest totals in the 7.0–8.5 range. From 2016-2023, the MLB All-Star O/U hasn’t even hit the 7.5 mark more than once. That tells you the market still can’t price – or believe in – such a pitching-dominated game.
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Pay Attention to Pitching
Today’s pitching All-Stars all bring the heat. No knuckleballers or 9-inning horses that win through endurance. Not even your Greg Maddux All-Star types, the ground-ball, pitch-to-contact hurlers.
Now it’s guys with extra velocity and elite breaking stuff. Guys who get K’s and outs. As an MLB bettor, forget playing the Over in this mid-July game just because there’s so much batting talent on both sides of the ball. In the latest modern era, pitchers have a say.
That same trend gives the smart money another angle to cash. Early inning scoring has also been suppressed recently. There have been first-inning runs scored in only four of the last ten All-Star Games, and there’s a multi-year stretch of scoreless first innings mixed in there.
Derivative markets like “No run first inning” or first-inning total props can pay if you look at who’s on the mound and they check all of the above boxes. That’s because you’re often getting two aces (AL and NL) who know they’re getting one inning, maybe two max, and they can go all out like it’s a postseason appearance.
The AL Narrative
It’s actually not a narrative. It’s also not a storyline being hyped beyond what’s really happening. The AL has been owning the NL over the last 25 years at the All-Star Game.
With MLB World Series futures, both leagues have more or less an equal shot. For the All-Star Game though, this is one of those trends that is lasting long enough to matter.
It’s tough to pin down exactly why it’s happening, but roster construction, DH usage, and offensive depth seem to be the leading reasons. Books know it by now of course, so the AL has Opens as a favorite in most All-Star Games these days. The public money doesn’t seem to care though. They’re still piling into whatever side feels more “fun” or local. That means it’s often the host league. This can push lines away from the correct price though, which creates an edge for sharps.
That doesn’t mean you auto-bet the American League every year, but you also can’t ignore such a prominent MLB betting trend. That’s leaving information on the table.
Instead, say the NL is looking very strong in a given season, and you’re deciding between two fairly priced sides. The difference is that one side (the AL) has decades of recent dominance. That becomes your tie-breaker across multiple different All-Star game lines and bet types. Also, check if the market overcorrects after an NL win the year before. You can sometimes catch value on the AL at a small plus price that wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) exist.
Bullpen Usage at the All-Star Game
You can’t treat All-Star ‘pens like regular-season ones. They won’t get stretched and fatigued over multiple innings. In the Midsummer Classic, there’s no tired middle reliever journeyman working his third game in four nights. It’s an elite closer or top setup guy coming in for 15–20 max-effort pitches after a couple of starting aces have already hit the showers with 1-2 innings of elite stuff.
Keep in mind that managers need to respect the votes and the players that fans want to see as much as they don’t want to tire out a guy for what is really a meaningless game, at least when it comes to the MLB pennant races. Letting a guy get lit up is a bad look for a manager who needs to keep a clean resumé in today’s revolving door of coaching. That also makes for quick hooks instead of working through some trouble.
That compresses run-scoring windows into just a few innings where someone’s command is off. All the above factors add up to being the reason those All-Star game O/U’s have been trending to the Under for years now.
Betting Based on the Pen
What does it all mean for betting the game before the opening pitch and live betting it once it’s a couple of innings in?
Across all 9 innings, every arm that batters face is capable of an All-Star-level strikeout rate. Nobody is saving bullets for tomorrow. That makes full-game and alternate Unders worth a good look and more logical than chasing a scoreboard explosion in the 7th, 8th, or 9th.
From an All-Star game props betting standpoint, look at “no team totals above 5.5” and similar bets. That is, unless the ballpark in a particular year is a Coors Field kind of place, or specific rosters are just too packed with offensive firepower.
A side note: despite all the pitching dominance and low-scoring games, only two pitchers have taken home the All-Star MVP title in the past 25 years. Most likely that comes from short stints and not being able to make that much of an individual mark on the game. For your MVP prop bets, look beyond the mound.
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