Can you predict a pitchers' duel before betting odds shift?

As with most sports, the bigger the hit, the more spectacular the point or goal being scored is, the more that fans enjoy it. In baseball, big home run hits are what make the highlight reel the most often, as the modern game is incredibly offensive-minded, with runs flying everywhere. But woven into all the explosive hits are those games which turn out to be a “pitchers’ duel”.

When two elite pitchers are fighting against very narrow margins, it can turn a low-scoring baseball game into an extremely entertaining, tense affair. While the pitchers’ duel is still very much part and parcel of the modern game, it’s become rarer. So can bettors learn to spot, early on in a game, that it’s going to be a tight battle on the mound?

For baseball betting fans, there’s no shortage of options. If you visit a site like Legalbet, which reviews licensed online bookmakers, and open any top-ranked sportsbook, you’ll find markets on the MLB and other competitions. During the heart of the season, matches are packed with betting options, including player prop bets, Team Total Runs and Innings Total Runs. Some of these markets, especially Total Runs, are directly influenced by a pitchers’ duel. So what does that actually mean?

A pitchers’ duel is a classic battle between the two starters in a game, where neither is giving up runs. It is really a masterclass of exceptional pitching where, in most cases, the game will end up being a low-scoring one, like 1-0 or 2-1.

A pitchers' duel is mostly focused on the starting pitchers, and this can sometimes run deep into a game, like the seventh innings, with those starters continuing for as long as possible while they are hot. But the term can technically cover any relief pitchers that come in with a fresh arm to try and close out the game.

In the 2025 MLB season, on average, there were 1.15 Home Runs scored per team, per game. The runs per team, per game on average were 4.44, pointing to a relatively modest scoring environment and underlining the influence pitchers had across the season.

The New York Yankees were the MLB leaders with 5.24 runs per game on average. Along with the Los Angeles Dodgers, who averaged 5.09, they were the only two teams to surpass the five-run mark. Looking at team hitting stats before a game starts can help bettors get an idea of whether a current game is going to be high-scoring or not.

Homework should have already been done on the starting pitchers, because if there are two with high stats in ERAs (Earned Run Average), WHIPs (Walks + Hits per Inning Pitched), and Strikeouts per 9 innings, then it has a higher potential of being a low-scoring game.

Current form, how a pitcher has been performing in their most recent visits to the mound, is also important, because that indicates hot or cold streaks. The quality of the opening aces is vital for insights, and bettors can work their way into other things like pitcher-friendly ballparks, weather and past performances of a pitcher against a certain type of batting line-up.

But there’s still no way to know how things are going to go until play begins. The first three innings can tell people a lot. If both pitchers are getting a high percentage of first-pitch strikes early, this could be a telling sign of a low-scoring game, because it creates tremendous pressure on the batters.

Getting in-game feedback about where the pitchers are hitting in the strike zone is also important. Are they right on the corner frequently, using good versatility, and is their velocity on-point with the average that they have been throwing all season?

Consistency in getting quick outs is also crucial for keeping the score down, as bases aren’t getting loaded. It’s statistical information like that which helps bettors decide on a Totals Line to try and get ahead of the bookmakers’ lines for live baseball odds.

While the excellence from the arms of the starting pitchers is still the biggest contributor to this, classic pitchers' duels aren’t as common any more, certainly not where there have been zero runs given up deep into a game.

In the modern game, it’s not common to see games with under three runs per game, for example, not when the average is up around 8. But pitchers’ duels creep out of the woodwork now and again, and waiting to see how the first few innings play out can help to predict pitchers’ duels, as they shape the game’s momentum.

This article was written in cooperation with James Evans