The MLB season opened Thursday with a big slate of games around the league to the delight of fans and gamblers alike. With the start of the season, now is as good a time as any to walk through some of the basics of baseball betting and how it differs from sports like football and basketball that have been discussed widely in this column.

Friday’s slate is a good one to illustrate some of these differences.

The Colorado Rockies take on the defending champion Los Angeles Dodgers in Coors Field to open the season. The total is in the double digits, which any Rockies fan knows is a common occurrence when they play at home. This brings up one of the first points to discuss betting baseball. That point is about the ballpark factor. No two stadiums are created equal. Some have larger or shorter areas of foul territory. Some are built with shorter or longer fences. Some have short porches or big green monsters. A line drive to left field at one stadium for a HR may end up as a double or even an out in another stadium.

A place like Yankee Stadium is built for left-handed hitters with a short porch only 314 feet away from home plate. Other stadiums like San Francisco have a huge wall in right field. The 325-foot fly ball may end up as a HR in one place and a lazy flyball out in another. Stadiums like Toronto or Cincinnati are launching pads where tons of homers are hit. Other places like Oakland are gigantic and fewer balls tend to end up in the stands there. Basketball courts are all basically the same size, but in baseball the actual dimensions of the playing surface is a factor that needs to be calculated. These things matter, especially when you are playing run totals

Home-court advantage is a real thing in most sports, but the difference in baseball is that certain stadiums actually enhance the powers or magnify the weaknesses of teams that may be playing there. Not factoring those differences into your analysis will yield unreliable results and unreliable results as the basis for your wagers will not yield the biggest profit.

Another factor we have to start considering with baseball is the weather. In basketball, this is not an issue since all games are indoors. In baseball, that is not the case. Beyond the obvious impairments of the wind and rain seen with football, other weather factors can affect baseball games

When the wind is blowing in from the outfield, you want to take unders at Wrigley Field. When it is blowing out, you want overs and home run props. The early-season wet weather around the country is a negative for well-hit balls carrying into the stands. Come July, when it’s hot and muggy, that same ball hit at the same velocity may end up as a HR instead of a long fly ball. Unlike park factors, which can benefit or hurt one team depending on their makeup, the weather factor is one that tends to aid or hurt both teams evenly.

Sometimes a park factor might move me onto a team in a certain situation. For example, a heavy left-handed lineup playing at Yankee Stadium is likely to hit more home runs than the same lineup playing in Oakland.

Therefore, I would be more inclined to play them in New York than I would be in Oakland. With weather, both teams have to deal with it, so early in the season the cold damp conditions are a negative.

In that case, rather than penalize one team or the other, the proper way to handle this is play the game total under. This way you benefit from the detriment or the aid on both sides to help you cash your bet.

As you can see here, baseball betting requires not only a deep knowledge of the teams, but also an overall understanding of how different factors need to be considered in baseball that we never have to worry about in some other sports.