Baseball betting free picks every day at Oddsbay.com!  Up for Thursday we’ve got a side and total position on nighttime action between the Pittsburgh Pirates and Milwaukee Brewers:

MILWAUKEE (GALLARDO) AT PITTSBURGH (OHLENDORF) 4:05 PM PACIFIC

One of the best money making tactics in sports betting is to isolate a change in team dynamics before the linesmakers and the general public catch on and compensate accordingly.  It’s not an easy thing to do, but figuring out when a good team is going to hit the skids or when a bad team is going to start playing competitively presents some of the strongest money making positions you’ll ever find at your favorite sportsbooks.  We may be witnessing such a transformation in team dynamics as we speak, though it’ll more readily manifest itself in the baseball totals rather than the side plays.

For most of the season, the Pittsburgh Pirates have ranked at or around the bottom of both the National League and Major League baseball in every relevant statistical category.  They’re dead last in runs scored in the NL, and next to last in the entire major leagues.  They’re 15^th out of 16 National League teams in team batting average, and have the third lowest team BA in all of baseball.  They’re #26 in the MLB in home runs and #28 in RBI’s.  They’re also a very young team—the top five players in the Pittsburgh batting order are in their first or second season in the big leagues.

In the past few games, something very strange has happened—the Pirates have started to tear the cover off the ball.  Over the weekend, the Pirates cranked out 17 or more hits in back to back games for the first time since 2006 leading manager John Russell to opine:

“Two days in a row lets the guys know what they’re capable of doing. It’s a good building block for these young guys. They’re starting to get the feeling they can score runs.”

Or, in other words, could it be that the talented but inexperienced top half of the Pirates batting order has finally figured out how to hit major league pitching with regularity?  Maybe, but at the very least they’re starting to produce good offensive numbers at home against relatively weak opposition.  With the exception of a 1 run game on Monday the Pirates have scored 12, 9, 11 and 13 in their last five.

Despite the recent scoring onslaught by Pittsburgh, the totals on Pirates games have remained low.  Against a Milwaukee team that has gone OVER in 51 of 89 games this year, we’ll look for today’s game to exceed the total and look for more situations to use Pittsburgh OVER until they give us a reason to do otherwise.

And while we’re at it, we’ll back the Pirates as good sized home underdogs.  Pittsburgh actually has a winning record at home (23-21) for a +8 unit profit on the year.  We like Brewers’ starter Yovani Gallardo who checks in with a 2.58 ERA but Milwaukee is only 9-9 in his starts with a losing 4-5 mark on the road.  Pittsburgh pounded another quality righthander in Roy Oswalt over the weekend, and if they’ve ‘turned the corner’ offensively there’s no reason they can’t send Gallardo to an early shower as well.

PLAY PITTSBURGH (OHLENDORF) +145 OVER MILWAUKEE (GALLARDO)
PLAY PITTSBURGH/MILWAUKEE OVER 8 -120

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