MLB Best Bets Today September 7
The Labor Day slate features a lot of early action, as there are only three truly late games, with a 5:10 p.m. ET game in San Diego. In the interest of lead time, I’ve moved down the card to look solely at those four games.
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.
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 September 7:
Cardinals vs. Giants Prediction
Pick: Giants 1st 5 Run Line -0.5 (+105)
I, and pretty much everybody else, will be looking for a bounce back from Logan Webb now that he’s back in the friendly confines of Oracle Park. The veteran right-hander got destroyed in Pittsburgh last time out with nine runs surrendered over two innings of work. He also gave up five runs in his road start on Aug. 21 against Boston. Fourteen runs in his last two roadies. He’s allowed six runs total in his last four home outings.
He now sports a 5.29 ERA on the road with a .255/.339/.390 slash and a .327 wOBA. At home, he has a 3.39 ERA with a .227/.266/.315 slash and a .258 wOBA over 85 innings of work. He’s fortunate to have 20.1 more innings pitched at home, otherwise his full-season numbers would look worse. But, he certainly has to have confidence when he is in San Francisco and the Cardinals have been a league average offense against RHP over the last 30 days.
We’ll see if Michael McGreevy can continue his Houdini acts, but the chickens may be coming home to roost now. He’s allowed 11 runs on 15 hits in his last two starts and has allowed at least three runs in each of his last five starts and seven of the last eight. He has a 3.97 ERA with a 5.36 xERA and a 4.31 FIP over 147.1 innings of work. His LOB% is starting to come down and his ERA is moving closer towards his xERA. Not surprising for a guy with just a 16.8% K%.
The Giants have some injuries and have done some shuffling in the bullpen, plus they’re at home, so I’d rather take the 1st 5 run line where I know they’ll bat the same number of times as the Cardinals.
Blue Jays vs. Athletics Prediction
Pick: Athletics +1.5 (+101); Jacob Lopez (ATH) Over 4.5 Strikeouts (+108)
We’ll see if the A’s can drum up enough offense to beat Dylan Cease and the Blue Jays, but a one-run defeat seems plenty reasonable today in Sacramento. Jacob Lopez has been excellent for a sustained period of time now, as he has a 2.36 ERA with a 2.88 xERA and a 3.58 FIP over his last nine starts, all of them coming in the second half. He has a 60/18 K/BB ratio in 49.2 innings of work and has only allowed an average exit velo of 83.2 mph with a 30.3% Hard Hit%.
That should be enough to keep his team in the game and maybe enough to match or even outlast Cease, who is having a stellar season. I don’t really have anything to say against him, as this is more of a play on Lopez with his recent returns. The 1st 5 Under 4.5 is juiced pretty heavily, so that wasn’t an option that I loved and the plus-money price on +1.5 seems worthwhile to me.
Lopez has a 14.4% SwStr% in that nine-start span and he’s getting a ton of Whiffs in the zone, which is very impressive with a 79.3% Z-Contact%. Even against a Blue Jays team that doesn’t really strike out much, this number seems manageable for a guy who has gone Over this total in eight of those nine starts and has pitched 6+ innings in four of the last five.
