| Play | Prop | Game | First pitch | Odds | Stake | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |  Elly De La Cruz | Over 0.5 hits | CIN@MIL | 7:45 ET | -174 | 1u |
| 2 |  Josh Bell | Over 0.5 hits | CLE@MIN | 8:10 ET | -160 | 1u |
| 3 |  Bryce Eldridge | Over 0.5 hits | SD@SF | 10:15 ET | -175 | 1u |
| 4 |  Yainer Diaz | Over 0.5 hits | HOU@TB | 7:10 ET | -165 | 1u |
Parlay of the Day: De La Cruz, Eldridge and Diaz together, about +297.
Dingers (separate record, 7-32): Kyle Stowers +920, LAD@MIA 7:10 ET, and Tyler Stephenson +809, CIN@MIL 7:45 ET. Two today, not three — almost every home run number on the board was priced worse than the odds of it actually happening.
Four on the board and every one of them is a bat. Fifteen games on the schedule and the pitching side of it did not survive the morning, which I will get to.
A hit prop is a contact question, not a power question. The only outcome where a hitter cannot help himself is a strikeout, so the guys worth paying for are the ones who almost never do it. Elly De La Cruz has a hit in 90 of his 127 games, seventy one percent, and that is the best full season rate on the slate. He is two for five off Dustin May already and Milwaukee has the roof shut, so he is the one leg tonight that the weather cannot reach. Yainer Diaz is the same argument from a different angle. He strikes out fifteen percent of the time against right handers and hits .273 off them, and Drew Rasmussen is a righty he is already two for three against.
Josh Bell and Bryce Eldridge are both handedness plays. Bell is a switch hitter and from the right side he hits .280 with a .747 OPS, and Minnesota draws the lefty Parker Messick. Eldridge is the mirror image, .298 and an .893 OPS against left handers, and San Diego starts Robbie Ray. The honest caveat on Bell is the sky. There is a sixty two percent chance of rain in Minnesota at first pitch, and a postponement voids the ticket rather than losing it.
What I threw out matters more than usual today. Cade Cavalli has gone eighteen outs in eight of his last ten starts and the number was sitting right on top of that, which looks like free money until you notice he is at roughly a hundred and fifty five innings against a stated cap around a hundred and sixty, and his manager has already said out loud he is looking to get him out after six. Every one of those ten starts happened before the cap started to bite. Matthew Liberatore looked like the best price on the board and has actually cleared his number in twelve of twenty eight starts, forty three percent, against a price implying fifty two. Brooks Lee showed the single biggest gap of anything I priced this morning and he is a switch hitter facing a lefty, which is the side he hits .217 on with a twenty five percent strikeout rate. The market had all three right and the model had all three wrong.
Two Dingers instead of three. Of two hundred and seventy one home run numbers on the board, only twenty eight were priced better than the odds of the thing actually happening, and most of those belonged to cold hitters. Kyle Stowers and Tyler Stephenson are the two who are both swinging well and fairly priced, and both of them play under a roof. Cal Raleigh is the hottest power bat in baseball right now, seven homers in fifteen games in the best home run park on the slate, and he is not here because you have to lay a number that is worse than his actual chance of doing it.
