CINCINNATI -1½ +109 over St. Louis
6:40 PM EST. After a horrible start to the year, Luis Castillo (RHP - CIN) is back in Cy Young form and then some. Dude has a sick 60% groundball rate over his last five starts, not to mention an even sicker 14% hard hit ball rate over that same span. His ERA over that span is 4.58 but his xERA is 2.60, which is best in the majors over the past five-game. In other words, no starter in the game is performing better than Luis Castillo is right now. He’ll now face a Cardinals' nine that just lost four of their past seven games to the Pirates in back-to-back weekends.
In a massive series to start the week, this is one of the biggest starting pitching mismatches of the year. We faded Jon Lester (LHP - St. L) last game out in Detroit and somehow this stiff managed to wiggle out of jam after jam in a 3-2 Cardinals win. Detroit outhit the Cards 11-5, had two base-runners thrown out and Lester came out smelling like a rose when in fact, he stunk the joint up again with a line-drive rate of 53%. We have not seen a line-drive rate of 53% ever. Lester’s xERA last game was 8.23 but as luck would have it, every ball was hit at someone. Over his past 25 frames, Lester has walked 11 and struck out 12. As we have reiterated before, Lester has experienced some control issues lately while running into too many bats. He is putrid, his arm is dead and he's pure fade material, thus, the attack on him must continue.
Ober cruising too should have nailed under lol
