MLB Best Bets Today April 25
The Saturday MLB card starts at 12:05 p.m. ET with the AL East rivalry between the Red Sox and Orioles and wraps up with a series of games that have first pitches in the 7 p.m. hour. We also have a game in Mexico City today, which I’m sure you picked up on based on the total of 15.5 across most of the market. It could be a rough one for German Marquez and Zac Gallen playing at that kind of elevation. Definitely keep that in mind evaluating all of the pitchers in that series going forward.
As is the case every Saturday, I’m very mindful of giving readers some lead time to check out the write-ups and the picks. I didn’t look at any of the games prior to the 4 p.m. hour as a result.
I’ll be posting my daily best bets Monday-Saturday with a Sunday Night Baseball preview on Sunday, as all the day games make it tough to get something out with lead time out here in Las Vegas. All lines are from DraftKings and are current at the time of publish. Please take the initiative to SHOP AROUND for the best odds. It matters. A lot.
One new offering this baseball season is our Opta AI Player Prop Projections. They are for VSiN Pro Subscribers only, so you can check out our current offers here. Zachary Cohen will be using those projections and his own handicapping to write up MLB player props.
Greg Peterson will have his best bets posted the night before and you can also check out his daily lines to see what looks to be off-market. Steve Makinen has also released his updated Bullpen Betting Systems and DraftKings Splits Systems, plus he’ll have a daily analytics report.
Feel free to use my opinions and thoughts, as well as our suite of MLB Betting Tools, including the DraftKings and Circa Betting Splits, Steve Makinen’s Daily Ratings, Greg Peterson’s Daily Lines, the 1st 5 Innings Analyzer, and Umpire Stats. Check out our new MLB tools powered by Ballpark Pal: Strikeout Projections, Park Factors, and YRFI Report.
That’s a lot of coverage and we’ll be doing it all season long. We’re happy to have you along for the ride.
Here are the MLB best bets today for April 25:
Washington Nationals at Chicago White Sox (-143, 8.5)
4:10 p.m. ET
We head to the South Side for the first pick of the day and it will be the Over between the Nationals and White Sox. These are two bottom-five bullpens in ERA, as the White Sox have a 5.40 ERA with a 4.82 xERA and a 4.94 FIP. The Nationals check in with a 5.43 ERA, 5.47 xERA, and a 5.68 FIP to go along with the league’s lowest K% as a unit. The White Sox have the third-lowest.
I led with that because I don’t think either starter will work very deep into this one. Nationals right-hander Jake Irvin has a 6.00 ERA with a 5.59 xERA and a 4.96 FIP over 24 innings. He’s seen a nice K% bump this season that looks pretty unsustainable with a 9.5% K% that grades well below average and the lowest Chase Rate of his career at 25%.
Over the last 14 days, the White Sox rank second to the Cubs in wRC+ at 134, slashing .260/.361/.484. The 11.5% BB% coupled with a 19.3% K% isn’t a great combo for Irvin, who has a 23.6% K% that should keep dropping and a 10.4% BB% that should also lower, but it’s a byproduct of his altered pitch mix. Irvin has allowed a 52.2% Hard Hit% and a 14.9% Barrel% thus far. He hasn’t gotten more than 15 outs in any start, leaving a lot of work for a really awful bullpen.
Chicago will send out prized prospect Noah Schultz, as the 22-year-old southpaw makes his third career MLB start. The 2022 first-round pick had a rough debut with 4.1 innings featuring four walks, four strikeouts, and four runs. It’s a pretty rapid ascent for a kid who had a 4.68 ERA with a 4.30 FIP and a 4.17 xFIP in the minors last season, including five starts at Triple-A with a 9.37 ERA and a 5.52 FIP.
The Nationals enter this game fourth in wRC+ against southpaws with a .272/.349/.441 slash. Schultz has faced the Rays and A’s so far, who rank 18th and 24th in wRC+ against lefties, so this is a step up in class. He’s pounded the strike zone early in counts with a 73.7% F-Strike%, but only has an 8.5% SwStr% and just a 23.5% Chase Rate despite being ahead in the count a lot, so that’s a big concern for me going forward.
This one might be heading down to 8 with cool conditions expected in Chicago, so you may be able to get that if you wait.
Pick: Over 8.5 (-102)
New York Yankees (-156, 9) at Houston Astros
7:10 p.m. ET
I was pretty spot on yesterday with the Yankees/Astros handicap, just barely missing out on the Lance McCullers Under Outs prop at a nice plus money price, but the Yankees easily covered the run line and McCullers only had three strikeouts in five innings. He got an inning-ending double play in the fifth and if that hadn’t happened, I think we would have gotten there. He was terrible with seven runs allowed on six hits. I still think he’s pitching through an injury, as he lost velocity in the third and fourth innings once again.
Anyway, on to the next one, as we get Ryan Weathers for the visitors and Mike Burrows for the hosts. Weathers is having a fine season on and off the field, as he enters this start with a 3.18 ERA and a 3.27 FIP and just came back from the paternity list after having a kid. It has to be tricky to compartmentalize that as a pro athlete when you are there for the birth and the first couple days and then head right back to work and go to Houston in the process.
Weathers has a 4.62 xERA, so I kind of buried the lede a little bit here. His 31% K% is doing a lot of heavy lifting as it pertains to stranding runners and overcoming hard contact. He has allowed a 43.1% Hard Hit%, which is above the league average, and a 12.5% Barrel%, which is well above the league average. He’ll get a stiff test here from the heavily right-handed Astros. This feels a lot like the start against the Angels to me, where he allowed four homers and five runs on five hits over five innings. Where it doesn’t feel a lot like the Angels start is that he had 10 strikeouts out of 22 batters. Houston has the sixth-lowest K% against LHP on the season.
The Astros are also going to be pretty clearly the best lineup Weathers has faced in this split. His five starts have come against the Mariners, Marlins, Athletics, Angels, and Royals, who rank 26th, 21st, 24th, 11th, and 25th against LHP by wRC+. The Astros are sixth.
On the surface, it’s been a brutal season for Burrows. He has a 6.75 ERA with a 4.82 FIP, but a 3.90 xERA and I think some positive regression is heading his way soon. The Astros acquired Burrows from the Pirates and dropped his arm angle rather significantly. He’s given up five homers, so it’s taken a bit of time to adjust, but he’s gotten very unlucky as well with a .378 BABIP and a 66.7% LOB%.
Burrows has allowed a .390 wOBA, but based on contact quality and other factors, he has a .315 xwOBA. He’s in the 66th percentile in Hard Hit% and 67th percentile in Barrel%, plus he ranks in the 78th percentile in Chase Rate. I’m not saying that Burrows is great by any means, but his ERA is nearly three runs higher than his xERA, so there’s definitely some significant room for improvement.
At the plus price, with some of the factors I talked about with Weathers, I could see Houston faring a lot better in the early innings tonight than they did last night. But, I want absolutely no part of their bullpen, so this is a 1st 5 look.
Pick: Astros 1st 5 (+120)
Pittsburgh Pirates at Milwaukee Brewers (-143, 8)
7:10 p.m. ET
Mitch Keller is no Tarik Skubal or Paul Skenes, but he’s having a fine start to the season and he’ll get a chance to build off of that against the Brewers tonight. Milwaukee will send flamethrower Jacob Misiorowski to the hill, so we have two very different pitchers here. Misiorowski racks up a lot of strikeouts and walks, while Keller has morphed into a true pitch-to-contact guy.
Keller’s K% is down from 20% to 16.5% this season, which is a bit surprising given that his SwStr% is similarly below average compared to last season and his Chase Rate is actually higher. But, Keller has really focused on inducing weak aerial contact and he’s succeeded thus far. His 38.4% Hard Hit% is his best since 2023 and his 2.3% Barrel% is trending towards being the best of his career. As it is, he’s been a guy who hasn’t allowed a lot of Barrels, but the way he’s been locating and sequencing this season has led to a 17.2% IFFB%. Pop ups are effectively strikeouts and Keller has only allowed a 24.4% Pull%, so he’s really done a masterful job of pitching away from damage.
He’s actually trending towards the best Chase Rate of his career. It’s still around league average, but it’s good to see because he’s still running a high called strike rate and has been able to leverage that into a lot of easy outs. He has a 2.79 ERA with a 3.51 xERA and a 3.30 FIP, so there are some mild regression signs, especially with his 4.28 xFIP, but I don’t see this as a matchup where that might happen.
The Brewers are 27th in Barrel% this season and 29th over the last 14 days. With some of their injuries, this offense has been having a tough time squaring up the baseball. What we’ve seen with Carmen Mlodzinski and Braxton Ashcraft makes me think that there’s some staying power to what all of the Pittsburgh pitchers are doing, including Keller.
I don’t really have a lot of great things to say about this matchup for the Pirates offense, as Misiorowski has struck out 42 of 111 batters and has a 3.04 ERA with a 2.89 xERA and a 3.62 FIP. He is a guy that can struggle with his pitch efficiency and that limits how deep he can work into games. If we get down to a bullpen battle, the Pirates have had the better relief corps thus far.
With the Pirates as an underdog, I’m banking on Keller going step-for-step with Misiorowski, if not maybe being slightly better. Pittsburgh has the better offense between the two right now and the better bullpen. That’s worthy of a shot at this price point.
Pick: Pirates +119
