Going All In On Gray And Twins

Twins vs. Cardinals, 7:45 ET

If you told me at the beginning of the year, that this matchup would showcase one team that was a division leader, and one that was near the bottom of their division, I probably would’ve believed you. However, I would’ve been significantly wrong about which team would be which. The Twins sit in first place of their division, while the Cardinals are one of the worst teams in baseball.

I’m really not sure what happened a couple of days ago. The Cleveland Guardians were within two games of the Minnesota Twins and for some reason decided it would be a good idea to trade away one of their best starting pitchers and one of their better hitters. So, did they just decide to hand the division to the Twins? Or did they say, it really doesn’t matter, we will catch the Twins anyway? There really wasn’t much movement from the Twins around the deadline. I don’t really imagine they think they are perfect as a team or anything. My opinion is that they probably are just thinking “Eh, we probably won’t win the first playoff series anyway, so let’s not get crazy right now.” However, after seeing what Cleveland did, you have to wonder why they wouldn’t try to make a splash and land a pitcher or hitter that could solidify the division for them. One guy doing his part for the Twins has been Sonny Gray. As an All-Star this season, he has been dominant in most of his outings. The Twins have lost all but one of his most recent six starts. While two of them were poor starts, the other ones were good enough that he put them in position to win. The problem is the hitting on this team is terrible. Look for Gray to put them in a position to win and keep an eye on Paul Goldschmidt. He is 1-for-20 against Gray in his career.

The St. Louis firesale is complete and they let go of basically any pitcher that they could. When you have as many successful years in a row as the Cardinals did, it is hard to imagine a season going this poorly. Somehow they are around 20 games under .500 and have three above average hitters in their lineup. The pitching staff had enough talent that this never should have happened. This will go down as one of the worst calls I’ve ever had in baseball. I picked them to win the division. At this point, they might finish dead last. They are sending out Matthew Liberatore to the hill in hopes of trying to remain competitive. This will be his first appearance in nearly a month. He has been better at home but still hasn’t been very good overall. His 6.75 ERA is tough to look at and he has allowed at least three earned runs in five of his past seven outings. The last time we saw him, he was getting hammered by the Marlins as they put four earned runs on him in just 0.1 innings worth of work.

I’m a bit surprised the line is this low for the Twins. I get it, Minnesota isn’t a good team, but they should be able to win this one in a matchup of Gray vs. Liberatore. I’m taking the Twins full game, first five, a run line sprinkle for the full game, sprinkle on run line through five, and a Twins ML/ML parlay first five/full game at plus money. Is it crazy, sure. but I’m essentially putting three units on this game. One unit on the full game, one on the first five, and the other unit to sprinkle on the other things.

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