MLB Best Bets Today May 2
While today seems to be all about the Kentucky Derby, and we do have a ton of coverage on it here at VSiN, there is also a full day on the diamond that begins at 1:35 p.m. ET and ends around midnight on the East Coast. Everybody should be able to play today, though the Astros vs. Red Sox game does have the chance to be impacted by rain enough to get banged.
There are a lot of guys with sample size on today’s card, as 18 starting pitchers will make their seventh starts of the season and six more will make their sixth starts of the season. The more data points we get, the more inferences we can make, so hopefully that will start to help us out more and more with our daily handicapping.
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.
Here are the MLB best bets today for May 2:
Cleveland Guardians at Athletics (-143, 10.5)
4:05 p.m. ET
If this is the start where Slade Cecconi figures it out, so be it. He has a 6.23 ERA with a 5.62 xERA and a 5.64 FIP over 30.1 innings covering six starts. He’s had one good outing, one okay outing, and four bad ones, as he’s allowed 4, 5, 6, and 7 runs in those starts. Now he’s going to the launching pad that is Sutter Health Park and he draws a very tough A’s lineup.
Cecconi has only allowed a 37.8% Hard Hit%, but a 12.2% Barrel%, including six Barrels in his last two starts. He doesn’t get a lot of chases or a lot of swings and misses. With his command profile, he’s making life extremely difficult on himself and this is not an ideal place for that. The A’s have actually underperformed in my opinion at home and still rank 10th in wOBA. Their .399 SLG at home will rise as the temps do and it’ll be in the mid-70s today with a little bit of a helping breeze.
The Guardians had to use six relievers yesterday because of the short start from Joey Cantillo, which included a multi-inning save for Cade Smith and another dumpster fire outing from Hunter Gaddis. This is still a bad bullpen. I’ll tip my cap if Cecconi somehow survives his trip to Sacramento and if this bullpen can walk the tightrope again, as the A’s were 2-for-13 with RISP yesterday and stranded 10.
By the way, the Guardians were 3-for-15 with RISP and stranded 10 and there were still 13 runs in the game.
Pick: Athletics Team Total Over 5.5 (+105)
New York Mets (-126, 8) at Los Angeles Angels
9:38 p.m. ET
There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the Mets these days, but Nolan McLean is not one of them. McLean looks to be on the path to being one of the league’s best pitches with a disgusting assortment of stuff. He’s got a 45/10 K/BB ratio so far this season over 35.1 innings of work and has allowed more than two runs in a start just once, putting up a 2.55 ERA with a 2.29 xERA and a 2.26 FIP.
He’s only allowed a 31.6% Hard Hit% and a 6.3% Barrel%. Surprisingly, he only has an 11.4% SwStr%, yet he’s still been totally dominant. More whiffs are probably coming and could very well come today against an Angels crew that has the highest K% in baseball over the last 14 days at 27.8%.
The Mets are missing some key pieces in their lineup for sure, but we have a pretty strong baseline for McLean and a pretty solid expectation. While Reid Detmers has a lot of positive regression signs in his profile with a 4.28 ERA, 2.94 xERA, and a 3.23 FIP over his six starts, he will face a lot of right-handed batters today and they’ve racked up 10 extra-base hits off of him already.
The Mets bullpen is up against it a bit with multiple guys on back-to-back appearances, but the Angels bullpen collectively has four blown saves dating back to Sunday and has absorbed three losses as the pitcher of record. This is simply not a good group right now with a 7.86 ERA and a 5.67 FIP over the last 14 days.
Pick: Mets -126
