Baseball betting free picks every day at Oddsbay.com!  Up today, we’ve got daytime action between the St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago Cubs and a night game between the San Diego Padres and Pittsburgh Pirates!

ST. LOUIS CARDINALS (SUPPAN) AT CHICAGO CUBS (WELLS) 11:20 AM PACIFIC

It’ll be a great day in race and sportsbooks with horse racing from Saratoga and Del Mar underway and afternoon baseball from Wriggly Field as the St. Louis Cardinals head up Interstate 55 to face the Chicago Cubs.  If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve figured out by now that we love going against the Cubs at home.  They’re invariably overpriced for reasons that aren’t exactly clear—obviously they’re a big ‘public’ team but at some point you’d think that even the general public would realize that they’re just throwing their baseball betting dollars down the drain by betting on the Cubbies?

The Cards lost last night but have otherwise been in very good form lately winning 9 of their last 11 games and pulling 1.5 games ahead of Cincinnati in the National League Central.  7 of those wins came against the Dodgers and Phillies, so it’s not like the Cards have been beating up on also rans during their streak.  St. Louis has admittedly been less than impressive on the road this season (20-26), but nothing can compare to the Cubs’ record of money burning at home.  They’re now 24-26 at home for a -14 unit loss and we’ll point to the mind boggling tradition of losing money for bettors they have at Wriggly Field—since 1997 the Cubs are 583-530 at home for a loss of -130.1 units!

Randy Wells has pitched well in his last few outings, but the Cards have pummeled him over the course of his career (0-2 11.57 ERA).  At the end of the day, this handicap comes back to the simple fact that due to the Cubs chronically inflated lines at home we’re getting the better team—in better form—at a decent sized underdog price.  Jeff Suppan may not be the ace of the Cards’ staff, but he gives us more value to work with.

PLAY ST. LOUIS (SUPPAN) +140 OVER CHICAGO CUBS (WELLS)

SAN DIEGO PADRES (CORREIA) AT PITTSBURGH PIRATES (MAHOLM)

Pittsburgh didn’t do us any favors yesterday, and now they’re in a position where we’ll be looking to go against them.  The NL West leading San Diego Padres are in town, and for some reason they’re shorter favorites than the Milwaukee Brewers were yesterday.  Obviously, much of that priced was based on the solid recent form of the Brewers’ Yovani Gallardo but as we so often stress there are few pitchers in baseball that are dominant enough to justify a betting position by themselves.  The Padres haven’t really been accepted by the ‘public’ as a legit team despite the fact that they’ve been able to stay ahead of the Dodgers and Giants for most of the season.  San Diego has made a ton of money on the road (25-20 +11.4 units) and against lefthanded starters (18-10 +10 units).  Pirates are 10-27 -10.7 units on the year against teams with winning records, and 20-45 -16.7 units against righthanded pitchers.  Wesley Correia’s numbers aren’t great but the important thing is that San Diego has won 11 of his 18 starts including 4 of 7 on the road.  Padres have dominated the Pirates in head to head at Pittsburgh in recent years (6-2 +4.1 units) and we’ll gladly back the much better team as short priced favorites.

PLAY SAN DIEGO (CORREIA) -115 OVER PITTSBURGH (MAHOLM)

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