As I write this on Monday morning, the weather is clear here in Las Vegas (weather.com has it as 100 degrees and "mostly sunny" which I take it as a glass-is-half-full way of saying partly cloudy or, as would be more appropriate, partly hazy).
    But I digress.
    The reason I have weather on the mind is because, even though it's nice here, the ViewFromVegas as I glance around the country is less than perfect with thunderstorms throughout the Midwest and upper East Coast. Cooling off on a beautiful summer day in my pool yesterday, and spending a lot of the rest of my time in this city's race and sports books (and the biggest sporting event I was involved with Sunday were the races at Del Mar, which was postcard-perfect weather), I was pretty sheltered from that until I started looking around at sports results from the weekend.
    Baseball betting is nowhere near the "event" type of betting where people flock to the sports books like they do for football, or for March Madness and big basketball games. It's more of a day-to-day grind. An occasional exception can be made when there are single games on Sunday nights on ESPN and it's the only game to bet on in town.
    So, Sunday night's Cardinals-Cubs game drew more action than it regularly would, especially with the Cardinals trying to continue their late-season rally as they sat four games back of the NL Central-leading Cubs, plus Carlos Zambrano making his first start since signing a five-year, $91 million contract. Zambrano threw three scoreless innings and the Cubs were batting in the bottom of the third when the skies opened and they had a rain delay, which then became a postponed game after 1 hour, 48 minutes. Bettors were left with the Giants-Ravens exhibition game that the Giants won 13-12 as a 3-point underdog.
    Now, over the year, most bettors have become aware of house rules at sports books and knew that all bets would be refunded on a postponed game. A baseball game (and all team sports for that matter) has to be played on the date and at the site for which that game was scheduled or all bets are refunded.
    But that's not the case for all sports The 3M Performance 400 Nextel Cup race at Michigan International Speedway was scheduled for Sunday but was rained out. They tried to hold it Monday, but that was also called off as rain continue to pelt the middle of the country (note: the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pa., was also rained out, though betting on the LLWS is prohibited in Vegas sports books) and they'll try again on Tuesday. What happens to those tickets? In a nutshell: they're still live. If you wagered on the race, obviously double-check with your outlet, but the standard disclaimer for auto racing is "the race must be run within 30 days of the scheduled date." You'll see this a lot in sports that are reliant on the weather. It's not uncommon for golf tournaments have rain force the final round to be played on a Monday, or a playoff in the case of the U.S. Open, so it wouldn't make sense to require that those events end on the scheduled date to be valid. THe game goes with tennis tournaments. Heck, even World Series futures state that a champion must be decided in the calendar year.

Sports book notes

    Some events were able to avoid the rain drops, or were held indoors:
* Heading into the weekend, rookie Brandt Snedeker had never won on the PGA Tour, so casual golf fans (and maybe even some rabid ones) might have been surprised to see him as the Las Vegas Hilton's co-second choice at 20-1 in the Wyndham Championship in Greensboro, N.C. But there the 26-year-old was in contention on Sunday and he pulled away for a two-stroke victory. With Tiger Woods continuing to take some time off after his PGA Championship victory, Ernie Els is the 12-1 favorite in this weekend's Barclays tourney at Westchester Country Club in Harrison, N.Y. Phil Mickelson, Jim Furyk and Vijay Singh are the co-second choices at 20-1 with Padraig Harrington and Sergio at 20-1.
* The WNBA regular season concluded Sunday and the playoffs start on Thursday. The Detroit Shock are the 2-1 favorites to repeat as champions, with the Phoenix Mercury at 7-2, followed by the Connecticut Sun at 9-2, Indiana Fever at 5-1, San Antonio Silver Stars and Sacramento Monarchs both at 7-1, Seattle Storm at 10-1 and New York Liberty at 30-1.
* With Michael Vick reportedly due to plead guilty to dogfighting charges, maybe all books will put up adjusted prices on the Falcons' over/under season win totals this season and a line on their regular-season opener vs. the Dolphins. It's been surprising that so many books have kept those off the board so long though it was pretty obvious weeks ago that there was no way Vick was going to play this season. The Las Vegas Hilton has the Falcons' over/under at 6.5 after being as high as 8 this spring. Their Week 1 line opened at pick-em at most places, but ever since it appeared Vick would not be playing and instead replaced by Joey Harrington, that number is now Dolphins -2.5.
* As for this past weekend's NFL preseason games, the dogs were barking (oops, poor choice of words) early as they went 4-1 against the spread in Thursday's and Friday's games. Favorites held a 5-4 edge on Saturday, though the Giants upset on Sunday improved the underdogs' record to 9-6 vs. the spread heading into Monday night's Bears-Colts game, which opened with the Colts at -2.5 though money has turned the spread totally around as the Bears were -2.5 at most books early Monday with some 3's starting to pop up. To date, underdogs are 19-13 (60.6 percent). Home-field advantage hasn't meant much in preseason as road teams are 18-13 (the difference in the number of games being the Hall of Fame Game at a neutral site in Canton, Ohio). After the unders held a 9-7-1 edge heading into this weekend, scoring picked up and overs went 11-4 to take an 18-13-1 advantage.