April 17, 2008 Baseball Picks

New York Yankees (112) over Boston Red Sox (1.0 Units) - This pick was an obvious one for us today because of the following bullets.
- The underdog in this series is a whopping +41 units the past 8 full seasons.
- When the home team is a dog, they are undervalued by about 25 points (win percentage: 53%) on the spread because of the increased bettor attention to these games.
- We also have angles that tell us to take teams coming off double digit wins, specifically at home where they are more likely to continue scoring runs.

When these two teams square off, there is so much parity between the two ball clubs that it does not matter who is pitching, they always score plenty of runs. And if the bullpen comes in has a chance to screw it up as well. So over reliance on starting pitching is a fault at looking at these games. And you've got to take the home underdog who scored 15 runs last night, go Yankees.

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Kansas City Royals (145) over Los Angeles Angels (1.0 Units) - We've mentioned before that the winner of game 1 in a 2-game series will tend to perform strongly against the moneyline in game 2 but only really if they scored plenty of runs in game 1. This was not the case for the Royals yesterday but we still want to take them. First, Jon Garland is really struggling this season and his worst start of the year was at home. Tomko, on the other hand is having a good year. And the Angels offense cannot be feeling good about themselves after losing another decent outing by Weaver. And then lastly, these Royals are totally being disrespected against the moneyline at +145. They may not have the best chance of winning today but getting them at +145 when they really should be +120 is like getting $25 free and then making a 50/50 bet on a heads or tails..

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We've also got some interesting angles going on with respect to take the Reds today so we will post that on our site around noon.