Guardians Will Take Series Opener

Guardians vs. Yankees, 7:05 ET

We've had our first official full month of baseball and it was a pretty pedestrian outcome from me. Sure there were some nice plus-money wins, but there was also a lot of inconsistency. Now that we have a bit more data, I'm hoping that we can start making some runs here and getting on nice winning streaks. Let's start today.

The Guardians come into this game with a sub-.500 record after one month. I never thought that Cleveland was going to be able to score a ton of runs or be some sort of offensive juggernaut, and to this point they are performing about as expected. The strength of this team was always supposed to be the pitching staff but right now they aren't looking as sharp as they have in the past. Today they get Cal Quantrill taking the ball against the Yankees. He has been hit fairly hard in the opening month of the season. His best starts of the season have come on the road and both of the past two outings were quality starts. Quantrill has had success against the Yankees in the past with just 10 hits allowed in 52 at-bats.

Interestingly enough, the Yankees were a team that I expected to be the opposite of the Guardians. I thought the Yankees were going to absolutely mash the ball this season with their dominant lineup. Looking at the team, they have 10 guys that can hit very well, but only a few of them are doing it up to this point in the season. I have to expect they will get it all together. But being just 15-14 over the first month can only be described as a disappointment. Now they send Domingo German to the bump in order to compete with the Guardians. He's been a mixed bag of results and did face the Guardians once, allowing one earned run over just three innings. He walked five batters in that outing, so he was lucky to escape with that little bit of damage.

I think this is a game the Guardians can take. German isn't the best of pitchers, and neither is Quantrill, but I do think that Quantrill is a better starter. I'm going to back Cleveland in this game at +100 through five innings.

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