Stud Hitter Tuesday
I don’t like to take the low-hanging fruit. It’s not interesting or fun or impressive to predict that Aaron Judge or Shohei Ohtani will hit a homer, or that Luis Arraez will get a base hit. But I have to do this today.
I’ve rarely seen Ohtani popping up on the BOOM hitters because of his higher SwStr%. Ohtani whiffs a good bit. His contact rate dating back to last season is 70%, and he has struck out 23% of the time. That makes him at least a little bit susceptible to not ALWAYS having a good game. But tonight, against Tanner Bibee, we don’t seem to have that risk.
He is on the BOOM hitters list with his usual elite xwOBA (.507 in this case), but this time, the SwStr% is below 11% at 10.2%.
So yeah, I’m not exactly sure what Tanner Bibee can do here besides get really lucky.
But what do we do with this information? It’s not profitable to bet on the league’s best home run hitters. My model says he has a 27% chance of homering tonight, the DraftKings line says 29%. It’s not a good bet.
What I am leaning into is adding two more studs to the list.
We have Juan Soto and Ronald Acuna Jr. both on this slate, and they both show up big in their matchups today. Soto has a 5.8% SwStr% against Cannon’s stuff, and Acuna Jr. is at 5.7% against what Suarez throws. You very rarely get this kind of SwStr% with the elite quality of contact. So you can parlay all these guys together for over 1.5 total bases. That’s what I’m going for.
→ Ohtani -135
→ Acuna +115
→ Soto +120
→ Parlayed: +723
Nationals Hits vs. Logan Evans
It looks like the Nationals will roll out nine left-handed bats against Logan Evans tonight. We don’t have a ton of data on Evans so far, but from what we do have, he looks very much like a pitch-to-contact pitcher. He has an 18% K% and a 7.7% BB% in the Majors in his 27 innings.
This Nats lineup is unique. They don’t have much power outside of their young slugger James Wood. They surround Wood with a lot of aggressive, contact-heavy bats. The team does not strike out a ton, and they also take walks at one of the lower rates in the league. The projected lineup tonight has a collective 6.2% BB%, and they take 3.757 pitches per plate appearance on average. They swing early and often. Combine that with Evans lack of whiff-ability, and I think we have a good spot for the Nats to pile up some hits here.
Logan Evans 5+ Hits Allowed -145