Editor’s Note: For about two and a half years now, Joe has been publishing picks here and back at All Things NIT, our former site. There have been moments of elation (the Nationals winning the 2019 World Series, the first two months of the 2019-20 college basketball season). There have been moments of frustration (the Dodgers’ 2020 NLCS comeback, the second two months of the 2019-20 college basketball season). Overall, the results have been positive, with an average return on investment, per pick, of 0.7% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 1,453 published picks, not including pending futures. And while 0.7% might not sound enormous, you can do a lot with it over time.
Use these picks at your own risk. Only you are responsible for any money you lose, and you should not bet more than you can afford to lose. If you have a gambling problem, get help.
Lines for these come from the Vegas consensus or the closest approximation available at the time picks are written, unless otherwise noted. FanGraphs is heavily used in making MLB picks.
Milwaukee @ Colorado
Is the Brewers offense really that bad? It’s 28th in Major League Baseball in wRC+, with the numbers hardly better when you reduce the sample to games from May 1st or June 1st onwards. It’s coming off a three-game sweep for which it was largely responsible, with the Crew managing just four meager runs against the Reds despite one of the games including an extra inning. One of its better hitters, Kolten Wong, is on the injured list, and while he’s expected to return this weekend, it doesn’t sound all that likely the activation will come tonight.
And yet…
Of the likely starting lineup tonight, only one hitter—Omar Narváez—has a wOBA notably higher than his xwOBA. Avisaíl García has suffered a 25-point shortage in that comparison. Jackie Bradley Jr. is down 34 points. Daniel Vogelbach’s about dead even, but even he can be expected to perform better than his season-to-date stats suggest, with his wRC+ slightly better than his projection if you just remove the first seventeen days of April.
There’s also the matter, of course, of Brandon Woodruff. The Rockies will presumably struggle to score tonight.
But will they?
It’s going to be hot in Denver. The wind’s going to be blowing out in Denver. Woodruff’s yet to show a significant change in spin rate this year, but his RPM did jump on nearly everything between 2019 and 2020 despite little change in velocity, suggesting he may be on the cusp of a very bad evening.
If your book doesn’t take a larger vig on alternative totals, there’s a case to be made for taking more of a longshot than this. I’d guess the Woodruff piece of the equation flattens the probability curve, given a great outing is more likely than with an average pitcher while the thing blowing up on him is, for the evening at least, more likely than it normally is. Still, even if the probability curve’s a bit flat, the median’s in the same spot, and it’s to the right of this line by 1.2 runs or so.
Pick: Over 10 (-115). Low confidence.
