April 28, 2008 Baseball Picks

Cincinnati Reds (134) over St. Louis Cardinals (1.0 Units) -

The premium systems for purchase on our site are 20-19, +2.46 units thus far in the season but our system CT has gone [2-5, -2.52 units] and these Reds fall into that system perfectly. So if they lose, we'll have a bit of buyer's remorse but 7 games is hardly a large enough of a sample size for us to discredit the system.

The system basically involves taking divisional rival dogs in the first game of a series against a right handed pitcher limited by a large number of constraining criteria. We cannot get into all the constraints as it would consume a couple of pages just to explain the WHY of them all. But here's the gist. The Reds have won 2 straight games by scoring double digit runs in each of those games. The impressive point to all of that is the fact that it was done on the road.

So we do not feel shy to take their offense and their momentum as significant underdogs today against Todd Wellemeyer. We went against Arroyo in his last start on the basis that he's being overvalued but we feel that he is due for a big game as he has had time to prepare for this game.

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Baltimore Orioles (133) over Chicago White Sox (1.0 Units) -

The Orioles are in a three-way tie for first place in the AL East while the White Sox have a 2.5 game lead in the AL Central. So this game definitely matters a lot to both teams, so here's the deal. Road teams in the fourth game of a series have a 1% better chance of winning (47.3%) than they do in the first game of a series (46.3%) which is because as any series progresses the home field advantage slowly diminishes.

You couple that with the fact that we believe Vazquez has been overvalued consistently this season because of his 15-8 season last year.

This would be a much stronger play if the Orioles had lost game 1 as teams down 0-3 heading into the fourth game of a series are +17 units over the past 9 seasons proving that it is hard to sweep a team in 4 games.