MLB Best Bets Today August 3
Today will be a tough day for a lot of players, as the Trade Deadline will send friends, teammates, or even themselves off to another team. I hate that games are played today, as you never really know how teams are going to react to the moves that are made or who will be included in those transactions. The league should be completely off today, as playing a game today is probably not what most want to do. But, we have eight of them and they’re all night games, so let’s see if there are any bets to make.
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 MLB tools powered by Ballpark Pal: Strikeout Projections, Park Factors, and YRFI Report.
Here are the MLB best bets today for August 3:
Dodgers vs. Cubs Prediction
Pick: Cubs +104
It was a late night for the Dodgers, though maybe not as late as it was for the Red Sox, who had yet another Delta breakdown following Sunday Night Baseball, but LA arrived in Chicago after 3 a.m. local time to hit the sack and get some rest in advance of tonight’s game against the Cubs.
We’ll see southpaw Justin Wrobleski for the Dodgers and fellow southpaw Matthew Boyd for the Cubs, as I think this amounts to a schedule loss for the Dodgers. This is a team that leads the NL West by 10 games and currently has a grip on one of the two byes in the NL postseason. With newcomer Tarik Skubal slated to start on Tuesday, that seems like a game that they’ll focus all of their attention on.
Tonight, Wrobleski is a pretty massive regression candidate against a Cubs lineup that battered lefties throughout the month of July. Wrobleski has a 2.88 ERA with a 4.32 xERA and a 3.60 FIP over his 112.2 innings of work. It’s hard to see him continuing to run an 81.2% LOB% with a paltry 19.4% K%. Also, a .252 BABIP is tough to maintain with a 43% Hard Hit% and an 8.3% Barrel%.
If you look at his Statcast page, Wrobleski has a wOBA against of .270, but a .320 xwOBA against. That’s a really, really big gap and one that should tighten as the season goes along. With a 28th percentile K%, 11th percentile Whiff%, and a 16th percentile xBA of .267, it’s going to be tough to continue getting blessed by the BABIP gods.
Since coming off the IL on June 25, Boyd sports a 1.93 ERA. He, too, has a ton of regression signs in the profile with a 4.28 xERA and a 4.24 FIP in that span, as he has just a 29/13 K/BB ratio over those 42 innings of work. His K% of 16.7% in that span is even worse than Wrobleski’s for the season. So, I certainly have concerns about him, but the Dodgers are in a compromising scheduling spot, plus the Cubs lineup assaulted southpaws throughout July with a league-leading .301 BA, .387 wOBA, 148 wRC+, and a .509 SLG. The Dodgers, meanwhile, were 16th in wRC+ at 98 with a .254/.314/.410 slash.
I’ll give the Cubs a look today, especially as another team that is a buyer right now, so the Trade Deadline emotions shouldn’t bother them quite as much as others.
