NEW: Follow us on Twitter!

Picks for 5/21/09: Divisional Rival Dog Picks in the Brewers

Click here if you are looking for today's free baseball picks?

Rivalry Page: Brewers vs Astros

Rivalry Page: Angels vs Mariners

Result: +2.32 units

Milwaukee Brewers (131) over Houston Astros (1.0 Units) -

We love the Brewers today. They are a divsional rival dog that is being undervalued for a couple of reasons. First, they are undervalued because they are going up against Oswalt but that dude is not the same as he used to be. And second, because they are on the road but who cares. They are 13-8 on the road this season and Jeff Suppan is 4-1 this season on the road. He does much better than he does on the road.

The next good thing about the Brewers here today is the fact that they are coming off a loss that just ended a nifty little winning streak.

Blindly betting on road divisional rival dogs, you'd be betting on teams that are undervalued by just 2.7 points. If the road team has a better than 50% road record, then they are undervalued by about 5.4 points. And it improves to over 20 points if their opponent has a worse than 50% home record.

We definitely fall into this situation today.

Take this game action on Jeff Suppan pitching.

-------------------------------------

Los Angeles Angels (101) over Seattle Mariners (1.0 Units) -

There's a system that benefits teams that have lost 1-0.

It is not easy to get shut out. And you could blindly bet a team that got shut out but you would be digging a whole in your wallet. That is because there are just so many teams that are poor offensively and/or in a slump that will not have the ability to bounce back. Like in basketball, you'd want to bet on teams that are coming off a poor offensive performance and justifying that with them having a bounce back game. But if you stuck high schoolers out there and they had a poor offensive performance, they wouldn't have the ability to bounce back.

So we generally will look to see how a team has been hitting before their shutout. To see if they had some signs of life. They scored 16 runs in the first two games of this series. And if you check, that was following up their only other shut out of the season against the Rangers. So there's good precedent here.

We think the Angels will bounce back tonight against Erik Bedard whom they hit well against in his career. They have Joe Saunders on the mound, who is 5-1 in his career against the Mariners.