BEST LINE: Pinnacle +111

Posted at 9:40 AM EST

Pitching for the Astros, Dallas Keuchel has been undervalued the entire year…….until now. We’re always mindful of the buy-low/sell high theory and that comes into play here. Keuchel is 7-3 with a 2.50 ERA after 12 starts. The Astros have won seven of his last nine starts and overall in those 12 starts, Keuchel has been a dog 11 times and favored just one time. That one time he was favored occurred at home when he was -114 against Chris Tillman and the Orioles. Baltimore won that game 4-1. Now Keuchel is at his highest price of the year (-120) and that makes us instant sellers. Don’t get us wrong, Keuchel is good but he’s also been greatly aided by an 85% strand rate over his last seven starts. He’ll now face a Diamondbacks team that has quietly won six of their past eight games while scoring 55 times over that span.

In 13 starts, Brandon McCarthy is 1-8 with a 5.13 ERA. A crazy 22% hr/f against RH bats, the second-highest mark in MLB is the main cause of that misleading ERA and what makes that even crazier is that McCarthy has an elite groundball rate of 55%. One could safely call Brandon McCarthy the unluckiest pitcher in baseball but his skills scream out that ERA regression is 100% inevitable. In 79 innings, McCarthy has 72 K’s while issuing just 14 walks. That’s outstanding control with a strong K rate. He also has a groundball/fly-ball split of 55%/23% for one of the best GB/FB profiles in the game. McCarthy’s swinging strike rate of 12% supports his 72 strikeouts. McCarthy’s xERA on the year is 3.06 and his xERA over his past five starts is 2.82. You rarely see a pitcher with an xERA more than two runs higher or lower than his actual ERA but that’s the case with McCarthy. You are about to see significant improvement in McCarthy’s surface stats because his skills say so. This is a top-shelf pitcher at a second or third-tier price. Invest.