If you’ve got one of those Sacagawea dollars (or a loonie – hello, Canada) burning a hole in your pocket, forget about the lottery. Might as well let it ride on the Oakland Athletics to win the American League West Division.

The A’s are 9-1 to win the West, giving them long enough odds for the payout to generate a strong sense of satisfaction – and buy some chips and dip for the playoffs. Oakland is coming off its first losing season since 1998, a streak that included four division titles and a Wild Card in 2001, when Oakland was second to the Seattle Mariners despite winning 102 games.

Seattle (9-4) isn’t nearly as good these days. The favored Los Angeles Angels (4-9) are vulnerable this year because of injured pitchers and a lack of power in the heart of the batting order. And the Texas Rangers (14-1) haven’t even come close since their last division title in 1999. Go Moneyball.

Baseball, though declining in popularity, is still the easy No. 2 sport of choice in North America behind our lord and sovereign, NFL football. But gamblers aren’t quite as fervent about the national pastime; something about the lack of a pointspread doesn’t sit right with some.

If the moneyline isn’t your cup of tea, what if we told you that baseball is a big pile of cash waiting to jump into your wallet? The nature of the sport makes it very friendly to handicappers; it’s a mechanical game, and player performance is relatively easy to measure with modern statistics. There’s very little teamwork involved – just nine guys out there doing their thing. The manager barely has to move once the game starts.

As for the moneyline, it’s really just another way for the books to balance the action on both sides. Do the math like you would for a game involving a pointspread. That’s what calculators are for.