With the Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals in a coin flip, maybe the Over is the right MLB pick for Wednesday’s Route 66 Rivalry game.
Wednesday 21, July , 2021 – 8:15 PM EDT at Busch Stadium
Okay, that definitely wasn’t in the script. The San Francisco Giants were supposed to send Kevin Gausman to the mound last Friday when they visited the St. Louis Cardinals, but Gausman was a late scratch – he was given medical leave to be with his wife Taylor, who was having complications with her pregnancy. The good news is that she appears to be doing well now; the bad news is that our MLB pick was made irrelevant with the last-minute pitching change.
As suspected, the Cards did start Adam Wainwright (4.07 FIP) on Friday, and he’s due up again this Wednesday when they host the Chicago Cubs. No need to dance around this one: The Cubs have already tabbed Kyle Hendricks (4.76 FIP) as their starter, and at press time, they’ve just moved to slight –103 road faves on the MLB lines at Heritage Sports (visit our Heritage Sports Review), mere minutes after opening as –106 underdogs. Delightful.
Before we delve a bit further into these two pitchers, let’s take a look at the computer projections at FiveThirtyEight, where they’ve got the Cardinals winning this game 52 percent of the time. According to the suzerain of all gambling calculators, the BMR Odds Converter, that translates to a “fair” moneyline of St. Louis –108. They’re the value pick in this matchup at 115 when you factor in the vigorish.
It’s a teeny, tiny bit of value, though. If you need to dumb down your betting profile with small straight bets, hoping to get some larger props through without raising any alarms, maybe it’s worth your while. But we can probably do better with a generic Over. It’s still the right thing to do in these post-crackdown times; the Over went 33-21 (61.1 percent) in the seven days leading into Tuesday’s action, as pitchers have been forced to eschew the sticky stuff that made their spin rates so high these past couple of years.
Well, that’s on the surface, at least. Pitchers still cheat, and recently, there seems to be a slight uptick in spin rates for many pitchers – maybe they’ve found other means, or they’re getting braver returning to their old ways. In any case, Hendricks has the Over at 11-8-1 this year; Wainwright has the Under at 10-8, but the Over is 3-2 in his last five appearances, including back-to-back outings where he failed to post quality starts.
We’re still looking at some hot and humid weather over Busch Stadium this Wednesday, although there’s no threat of rain (or flooding) compared to last Friday’s matchup. The humidity won’t help us with the Over, but the heat will – it’s supposed to be in the low-to-mid 80s throughout this contest. And since they’re going to be under close scrutiny on ESPN, maybe the pitchers will be even less likely to dip into their stickum arsenal. We’ll buy that for a dollar.
MLB Pick: Over 8 (-115) at YouWager (visit our YouWager 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.