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Brewers vs. Athletics MLB Best Bet: Scoring Barren by the Bay
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LT Profits
- August 25, 2024
Table of Contents
MLB Pick: Under 8.5 (-120) at Bookmaker
We enter Sunday’s full slate of MLB betting matchups 4-2 in our last six plays including a +125 winner Friday. We return today with three plays that we feel hold great betting value at the current MLB odds, courtesy of the top sportsbooks.
These plays are based mostly on our proprietary model. One of the best bets for Sunday comes in the Bay Area, where our model likes a total when the Brewers visit the Athletics.
Don’t forget to check out our other picks for Sunday:
Milwaukee Brewers vs. Oakland Athletics
Sunday, August 25, 2024 – 04:07 PM ET at Oakland Coliseum
In a matchup of two pitchers each holding sneaky value due to a change in circumstances, we are betting the Under when Frankie Montas and the Brewers visit Joey Estes and the Athletics.
Goodbye Cincinnati
Montas has had a solid if not spectacular Major League career with a 4.00 ERA, 3.98 xFIP and a nice strikeout rate of 9.04/9 over 708 innings. However, he did not enjoy his first season in Cincinnati to begin this season, as he had a 5.01 ERA and 4.70 xFIP. He was more tentative than usual pitching in a hitters’ park in Great American Ball Park, and thus had an abnormally low strikeout rate of 7.52/9.
This led to Frankie being traded to the Brewers, and he is now back to his solid ways. He has yet to allow more than three runs in four starts with Milwaukee and enters with a streak of 12 consecutive innings without allowing an earned run over his last two starts! And he has become more aggressive in the strike zone again with his K-rate back to 9.00/9 as a Brewer.
More Sliders
Estes enters at 5-6 with a 4.44 ERA and 5.17 xFIP, but those overall numbers do not tell the whole story. He has now allowed three runs or less in nine of his last ten starts, posting a 3.56 ERA during this span, and that improvement has coincided with a change in his repertoire.
Namely, Joey has increased the use of his slider to 35.2% over those 10 starts, now making it his second most frequent pitch. The significance of that is his slider is rated a whopping 126 on Stuff+. With batters now forced to respect the slider, it has made his ordinary 92.5 MPH fastball play faster, resulting in an excellent soft/hard contact ratio of 21.8% / 28.2% the last 10 starts.
For comparison, that ratio stood at an awful 11.1% / 34.3% before this 10-game stretch.
Therefore, with both pitchers in better situations that they were in at the start of this season, we are backing the Under in Oakland Sunday.
Predicted Score: Brewers 4 – Athletics 2
MLB Pick: Under 8.5 (-120) at Bookmaker (visit our Bookmaker Review)
*The line and/or odds on picks in this article might have moved since the content was commissioned. For updated line movements, visit BMR’s free betting odds product.
