Baseball Betting Time

It’s baseball season! For the degenerate gambling community that means 180+ days of opportunity to give your hard earned money to the bookies. Throughout the season, I will try and pick a few games and based on pitching matchups and team history. I will rarely pick a heavy favorite given they are too expensive. An example would be the Cards -200 tonight. For those new to gambling, that means you have to put down 200 to win 100 in that game…a bit expensive unless you want to parlay it with another game. With all of that said, here are my picks for tonight…

Yanks (-145) Tigers – I typically stay away from Yanks games. Partly because I’m a fan and my judgment may be clouded, but mostly because Yankee fans and front runners come out in droves to bet on them, often screwing up the line making the Yanks “expensive”. Today isn’t one of those days. Sabathia and the underdog Yanks have a little to prove and the gambling community is still in awe of how awesome Justin Verlander has looked. Reasons for taking the Yanks are as follows:

CC is an animal at home posting an 11-2 record at the Stadium last season -In his last three starts versus the Tigers, he is 2-1. All of those starts come against Verlander. The one loss comes from a bad outing in Detroit where he allowed 6 runs. The two wins were at the Stadium. He pitched 7 innings in both those games allowing a total of two runs while racking up a total of 13K’s

Giants (-110) Dodgers – It’s an even line with two great young pitchers facing up against each other in an opener. Tim Lincecum has pitched very well against the Dodgers (5-1 with a 1.19 WHIP). It’s also worth noting The Freak’s teams are 7-2 in games he starts against the Dodgers. When you add those solid numbers with the fact that Timmay is way too much of a stoner to give a crap about pitching a nationally televised season opener, you start warming up to the idea of placing a moderate wager on the boy.

As for the other dugout, Kershaw is an impressive young lefty with some gaudy numbers against the Giants. In his 5 starts against the Giants he has posted a 1.46 ERA, 6K’s/game, and a 0.83 WHIP. However, he has only one win to show for those efforts and his team is 3-2 in those games. As for opening day jitters, Kershaw pitched the Dodger home opener last season in a 4-3 loss to the Pirates and failed to get out of the 5th inning.