Baseball is appealing because the game state can be accurately modeled as a state machine. Don't let this fool you -- the impact of variation is much higher for a single baseball game, than for another sport.

I've won 4 of my last 9 baseball "futures" bets, with more than 2-1 payoffs (some were to make the playoffs, or o/u games won, etc.) That's the way to bet on baseball -- use a large sample size. It's easy enough, once the futures lines come out, to find bets that clearly have a positive expected outcome, when using advanced sabermetrics (the baseball term for "statistics" aka Moneyball).

Unless this is a passion, take the time you have allocated to running the analysis, and use it in a healthy manner. Or multiply it by your hourly wage. Then read fangraphs or BP to find the exploitable futures lines.