Wednesday July 20, 2005 MLB Picks

A 2-2 +0.30 Units day yesterday. You may even have been negative depending on the spreads you got. A lot of you had nasty juice on the Yankees-Rangers over/under. Had I known the juice would be that nasty, I would not have called that play.

Anyways, we were lucky to even go 2-2 as we saw our Blue Jays run line barely come in and the Rangers pull out 2 runs in the bottom of the 8th.

St. Louis Cardinals -1.5 RUNLINE +140 over Milwaukee Brewers (1.50 Units) This looks like a great pitching matchup on the surface. Ben Sheets versus Mark Mulder. We predict this to be one-sided. The Cardinals are 40-21 (+7.6 UNITS) against right handed pitching, averaging 5.2 runs per game. This improves to 23-9 (+7.11 UNITS) at home where they average 5.8 runs per game. To make it tick, if they are coming off a loss and are at home against a righty, they are 10-2 (+6.70 UNITS) averaging 6.7 runs per game. In this spot, they are 8-4 on the RUNLINE. This means that the Cardinals are only 30-19 (+0.90 UNITS) in every other situation versus righties. We got them at the right time. The Brewers are 20-31 on the road but what's worse is that they are 3-8 on the road versus lefties. Mulder is a pretty darn good lefty and we see the Brewers bats struggling today.

St. Louis Cardinals - Milwaukee Brewers OVER 8 (1.00 Units) We see the Cardinals scoring runs here today even against Ben Sheets. We do not expect much from the Brewers but in case they keep it close and make us lose our Run Line, we should get this over. As long as the Cardinals get 5 or more runs we will win one of these two wagers. Plus the name recognition of both of these pitchers is giving us a total that is about 1 full run off of where it should be based on the Cardinals motivation today. Plus, I expect a 7-3 game anyways.

Remember last week in Game #2 of the Red Sox - Yankees rivalry how we explained how strong the Red Sox were offensively off a loss versus righties. We used this identical explanation to predict the Rangers as winners yesterday. We were correct in our conclusion but we did not expect the Rangers to only get 2 runs. Nevertheless, the Red Sox won that game 17-1.

Today we see the Rangers in a similar situation against a no-name right-handed pitcher at home. The Rangers are not off a loss but expect them to feel as if they had. Yesterday they were very patient at the plate, taking every pitch. Mussina got to 100 pitches in no time. By the time Torre pulled him out, the Rangers had scored NOTHING. I expect the Rangers bats to be more aggressive here today against A. Small and it might not be pretty.

This is what I've got on the game.

Texas Rangers -115 MONEYLINE over New York Yankees (1.5 Units) Texas Rangers -1.5 +165 over New York Yankees (1.0 Units)