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The Run Environment
Here’s where Vegas has the runs tonight, straight off the sheet:
Cubs, 6.6 implied, vs Sean Sullivan
Pirates, 5.6 implied, vs Aaron Civale
Yankees, 5.5 implied, vs Anthony Kay
Braves, 5.5 implied, vs Adrian Houser
Red Sox, 5.4 implied, vs Max Scherzer
The Cubs at 6.6 are the alpha total on the board and it’s not close. They’re home at Wrigley in a 10-run game against Sean Sullivan, and the wind is blowing out at 8 mph. That’s the spot the field will find, and they should, but the question is always how you play a popular total, not whether you play it. The trap total for me is Boston at 5.4. The field sees the Scherzer name and runs the other way, and I get that, but Boston also sits in the smallest implied gap from the chalk and the lineup is a pile of cheap righties against an aging arm whose strikeout projection is down to 4.79. The quieter runs are in the Bronx: the Yankees at 5.5 against a soft lefty in Anthony Kay, and almost nobody is going to be on a Judge-less Yankee lineup full of $3,000 to $5,000 bats.
This is a 7-game medium slate, which means I’m not contorting myself for uniqueness the way I would on a 4-gamer, but I’m also not just submitting the optimizer’s first build. The latest games are Pirates at Athletics and Orioles at Mariners, both 9:41 ET, so those rosters are my late-swap reserves. The earliest lock is Blue Jays at Red Sox at 6:46, so anything Boston or Toronto is committed early with no swap insurance.
