Guardians, Rays And Yankees Moneylines: Three Prices Set By The Last Nine Innings

Pittsburgh walked out of Yankee Stadium at four o'clock this afternoon with a 5-3 win and the first half of a doubleheader in its pocket. Six hours later the same two clubs play again, and the price on the Yankees for the nightcap is -170. That number was set before the afternoon game finished. It has not moved to punish New York for losing, and it has not moved to reward Pittsburgh for winning, which is the entire reason this card exists. Three moneylines, 4.5 units, and every one of them is a bet that the last nine innings told you less than the last four months did.

Yankees Moneyline: Max Fried Has Allowed One Home Run Since May

Start with the number that should be the headline of this entire slate. Max Fried has given up one home run all season. One, in 61.2 innings across ten starts, with a 3.21 ERA, a 1.01 WHIP and a .199 opponent batting average. Pitchers who miss bats give up homers. Pitchers who induce weak contact give up homers. Fried does neither, because nothing he throws arrives on the same plane twice.

Look at the arsenal and the reason becomes obvious. His most-used pitch is a cutter at 22.4 percent and 92.0 mph, followed by a sinker at 22.1 percent and 93.1, a four-seamer at 16.8 percent and 94.7, a curveball at 14.2 percent and 73.9, a changeup at 13.7 percent and 85.5, and a sweeper at 9.8 percent and 79.9. Six pitches, none of them thrown more than a quarter of the time, spanning a twenty-one mile per hour velocity band. A hitter gets one guess per at-bat and the guess is almost always wrong.

Pittsburgh is the wrong lineup to bring into that. The Pirates hit .265 with a .785 OPS and 96 team home runs against right-handed pitching and fall to .254 with a .723 OPS and 36 homers against left-handers. They are also a fundamentally different team outside Pennsylvania: .276 with an .812 OPS at PNC Park, .249 with a .723 OPS on the road. Fried is a left-hander, and this is a road game. Both of Pittsburgh's problems arrive at once.

Pittsburgh answers with Bubba Chandler, who has the loudest fastball on the entire board and no idea where it is going. The 98.5 mph four-seamer accounts for 47.9 percent of everything he throws, and the results are a 4.77 ERA, a 1.45 WHIP and 55 walks in 94.1 innings, a rate of 5.25 per nine. He is 3-8. Put that command against a Yankees lineup that has hit 147 team home runs, the most in baseball, and 75 of them at Yankee Stadium, where Ben Rice alone has 30 with a .967 OPS, and the shape of the game becomes clear. New York does not need to string singles together. It needs Chandler to miss over the plate twice.

The market elsewhere has this game at -186. Two units at -170.

Guardians Moneyline: Cleveland Has Already Won This Series Twice

Minnesota came into Progressive Field on Monday and lost 13-4. On Tuesday the Twins lost 5-2. They have now lost four in a row, they are 49-53 with a minus-36 run differential, and they are 23-28 away from Target Field. Cleveland is 54-48, a game and a half out of first in the American League Central, and has won two straight.

The case is not really about tonight's starters, because tonight's starters are close to a wash and the honest read favors Minnesota's. What the case is about is run prevention over a hundred games. Cleveland's staff has a 3.73 ERA and has allowed 410 runs. Minnesota's staff has a 4.75 ERA and has allowed 521 runs, and the split gets uglier on the road, where Twins pitching carries a 5.33 ERA and a 1.48 WHIP against 4.21 and 1.32 at home. That is a full run and a tenth of separation in the environment this game is being played in.

Bailey Ober starts for Minnesota, and his profile is the specific thing that goes wrong in a bandbox-adjacent ballpark on a July evening. His fastball averages 88.4 mph, thrown 31.7 percent of the time, behind a changeup he uses more than anything else at 36.1 percent and 82.9. That works when the changeup plays and it does not work when it does not: Ober has surrendered 13 home runs in 77 innings, a rate of 1.52 per nine, the worst home run rate of any starter on this three-game card. His ERA is 4.32.

Cleveland counters with Slade Cecconi, a four-pitch right-hander who leans on a four-seamer at 26.9 percent and 93.2, a cutter at 24.4 percent and 88.2, and a sinker at 21.3 percent and 93.3. His 4.55 ERA and 1.41 WHIP are worse than Ober's and his .281 opponent average is the worst on the card. This is not a pick on Cecconi. It is a pick on the Guardians being 27-24 at home with a 3.60 home staff ERA while a team that has lost four straight tries to leave town with something. A unit and a half at -137.

Rays Moneyline: Plus Money On A Team Twelve Games Better

Tampa Bay is 58-42 and leads the American League East. Toronto is 46-55 and sits twelve and a half games back in last place. The Rays have won the first two games of this series at Rogers Centre by a combined 19-3, taking Monday 7-1 and Tuesday 12-2. Tonight the better team, riding a two-game winning streak, is the underdog at +106.

Toronto's problem is not complicated and it is not new. The Blue Jays have scored 400 runs in 101 games, an average of 3.96, the fewest in the major leagues. Their .683 team OPS is also the lowest in baseball. Against right-handed pitching, which is what they will see tonight, they hit .251 with a .698 OPS. They have lost three in a row and their run differential is minus-61.

Griffin Jax gets the ball for Tampa Bay with a 4.08 ERA and a 1.27 WHIP over 75 innings, and the strikeout rate matters more than the ERA here: 77 punchouts, 9.24 per nine. His arsenal is unusually flat by design, a sweeper at 26.0 percent and 87.9 mph, a changeup at 22.5 percent and 91.2, a sinker at 20.4 percent and 95.6, and a four-seamer at 18.0 percent and 96.2. Four pitches, all used between eighteen and twenty-six percent of the time. Against a lineup that already struggles to slug, spreading usage that evenly takes away the one thing a low-power offense can do, which is sit on a pitch and drive it.

Toronto's Braydon Fisher is the interesting counter and the reason this is one unit rather than two. He has a 3.65 ERA, a 1.18 WHIP and a .208 opponent average across 49.1 innings, and he is essentially a two-pitch breaking-ball pitcher: a slider 49.9 percent of the time at 88.6 mph and a curveball 29.0 percent at 81.6, with the four-seamer down at 17.3 percent. That is a genuinely awkward look. But he has made only six starts, he walks 4.01 per nine, and Tampa Bay hits .264 with a .759 OPS against right-handed pitching. Getting the first-place team at plus money in that spot is the play. One unit at +106.

What Can Beat It

The Yankees play carries the most obvious risk and it is not Chandler. It is the schedule. New York already played nine innings today, lost, and now runs a bullpen that has been in use since one o'clock into a night game. The Yankees are also 25-23 at Yankee Stadium and 31-22 on the road, one of the stranger home-road inversions of the season, and their home staff ERA of 3.74 is more than half a run worse than their 3.11 mark away from the Bronx. Pittsburgh, meanwhile, is the loudest offense on this card by a wide margin at 543 runs and 5.32 per game. If Fried leaves in the sixth, this gets uncomfortable fast.

Cleveland's problem is Cleveland's bats. The Guardians have scored 410 runs, an average of 4.02 per game, and their .690 team OPS is second-lowest in baseball. Minnesota, for all the losing, actually hits right-handed pitching well: .255 with a .756 OPS and 96 team home runs against righties, which is nearly sixty points of OPS better than what Cleveland manages against the same hand. Cecconi is a right-hander with a .281 opponent average. There is a real version of tonight where the Twins hit him around and Cleveland cannot answer.

The Rays have the least comfortable profile of the three. Tampa Bay is 23-27 on the road and hits .253 with a .703 OPS away from home against .269 and .778 at home, a 75-point OPS drop. They are also 4-6 in their last ten despite the two blowouts here. And after nineteen runs in two nights, regression is a reasonable expectation rather than a superstition. That is why this is the one-unit play on the card and not the flagship.

The Bottom Line

Four and a half units on three moneylines, and the connective tissue is that all three prices are anchored to recent noise. The Yankees at -170 are the flagship because Max Fried has allowed one home run in ten starts and Pittsburgh loses sixty-two points of OPS against left-handers and another sixty-two on the road. The Guardians at -137 are a run-prevention bet against a team that has allowed 111 more runs and pitches to a 5.33 ERA away from home. The Rays at +106 are simply the better team, twelve games better, priced as a coin flip because Toronto is at home. Take the arms, take the standings, and let the afternoon box score belong to the afternoon.

The fourth play of the day, a total, is on the companion card: Marlins at Astros Under 8. The full seventeen-game Wednesday slate is broken down on the MLB board, and Los Angeles at Philadelphia gets the long-form treatment on the Featured Game page. For verified betting records, visit the track record or the homepage.