2015 MLB Record
123 – 122 for -0.7 Units
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2015 MLB Playoffs Record
1 – 4 for -3.02 Units
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#1: St Louis Cardinals -135
Upon initial glance the pitching matchup today seems fairly even as both Hendricks and Garcia had excellent seasons ranking as my 23rd and 24th pitchers. But there are a couple of strong advantages in Garcia’s favor that make the Cardinals a clear cut team to back in today’s game. Hendricks has a 4.5 ERA on the road this year, as he’s substantially performed worse away from home. His 3.5 xFIP indicates some ‘poor luck’ involved but it’s still much higher than his 3.0 home xFIP mark. Additionally, I think this is a really poor matchup for Hendricks. The key for him is establishing his excellent changeup, his best pitch in his arsenal. Unfortunately for him, Cardinals rank 5th in the league against this offering. To make matters worse, they seemed very ‘comfortable’ against the pitch and against Hendricks himself when they faced him once earlier this season. In that game, Hendricks allowed 4 runs on 6 hits (1 HR) to go with 2 BB’s and only 1 K in 5 innings of work. His 6.7 SIERA in that game was the WORST single-game outing of this season for him. The Cards have seen him 3 times last year when he was a rookie, and in the one game against him this season they looked awfully comfortable.
You know who won’t be very ‘comfortable’ today? The Cubs’ hitters. Jaime Garcia is one of the better pitchers in the league, who features 5 different types of offerings, all above average (two and four seam fastballs, cutter, curve, and changeup). He also has a slick 61% GB-rate and only a 7% HR/FB rate. To go with a super low 6% BB-rate, it’s awfully hard to generate runs against him. Teams have to cluster a bunch of hits together to score runs, and against the type of ‘stuff’ he has it’s very difficult to do so on a consistent basis. Another major factor in his favor here is that most of the key Cubs hitters have never faced him before. Due to numerous injuries over the last few years and just scheduling luck this season, Garcia’s last start against the Cubs was in 2012, back when Alfonso Soriano and Darwin Barney were prominent fixtures for the North Siders. Out of the current players only Castro, Denorfia, and Fowler have had 9+ AB’s against him. Schwarber, Bryant, Rizzo, and Russell will be seeing Garcia for the very first time today and I think they’ll have a very tough time picking up his stuff. It’s worth mentioning that the Cubs are significantly worse against lefties (89 wRC+) than righties (98 wRC+) on the season. Last night I backed Chicago because Cards are really poor offensively against lefties. Cardinals barely generated any offense off Lester, but unfortunately Lackey was even more filthy. Today I expect the Cubs to struggle offensively just as much as they did yesterday, while I believe St Louis has a strong matchup in their favor to put up some runs. Garcia is an absolute stud who’s had experience pitching in playoff games in the past (6). This will be Hendricks’ first playoff start. Kid better have the nerves of steel because the pressure is on.
#2: Under 6 NYM/LAD -120
#3: New York Mets +1.5 RL -140
My projected total for this game is 5.7 combined runs so not too far off from the posted total of course. But the way these two starters are pitching right now, I think we’ll see another low-scoring game. Syndergaard is an elite pitcher ranking 12th in my database. What’s interesting is that in the last month of the season he’s been even better, sporting a 36% K-rate and a 1.7 xFIP, numbers even better than Kershaw’s (35% K-rate and 1.9 xFIP). Here are SIERA measures for his last 4 starts of the season: 1.5, 1.9, 1.4, 1.8. That’s as filthy as it gets. His 97 MPH fastball is his best pitch and the Dodgers’ offense ranks 24th against the offering in the 2nd half of the season. They couldn’t do anything against deGrom last night, another flame throwing Mets starter, who had 13K’s in 7 innings while allowing 0 runs with an xFIP of 1.3 for the game. I don’t see a reason why Syndergaard can’t have just as successful of an outing. Of course on the other side you have an elite pitcher in his own right in Greinke who has a 1.5 ERA at home on the year. Greinke has allowed 2 runs in 14 innings to the Mets this year and there’s no reason not to think that he’ll have a strong outing. Still, the ‘value’ is on the Mets here and in what I expect to be a very low scoring game, grabbing them at +1.5 runs is a very strong play as well.
Good Luck