Pittsburgh @ WASHINGTON
WASHINGTON -1½ +165 over Pittsburgh

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Posted at 8:50 AM EST.

1:05 PM EST. Jeremy Hellickson (RHP) may indeed get blown up here because he’s not very good. When skill decline happens this suddenly and sharply, one starts looking for explanations. There was No DL time last year but Hellickson suffered a forearm cramp in April, back tightness in May, calf tightness in July and back issue again in September. We suppose we can give him a pass on lousy season while keeping in mind that he wasn't exactly Kershaw prior to 2017. Hellickson is throwing 88 MPH fastballs these days but he’s throwing strikes and has a 4.57 xERA after three starts. We’ll live with whatever he delivers here because this wager is all about fading Trevor Williams.

Late in the off-season, Jeff McAvoy and Mike Berger officially took positions with the Dodgers and Brewers, respectively. McAvoy and Berger are recently fired Marlins executives, joining Marc DelPiano and Jim Benedict on the list of guys who have moved on to greener pastures after being cast aside by Miami’s new ownership and baseball operations group. All four executives were on back-loaded five-year contracts (of course they were), so the Marlins will now pay the quartet something north of $7 million to work for other teams over the next few seasons. That report shines a glaring, unforgiving spotlight on the price the franchise paid (and will continue to pay) for Benedict, who is now with the Cubs. It’s maddening, on its own, that he’ll draw seven figures in salary from the Fish while working for one of the league’s best teams, but the Marlins actually traded for Benedict. They gave the Pirates right-hander Trevor Williams (RHP) in November 2015, in a trade for a player with no value whatsoever, as compensation for hiring away the Bucs’ minor-league pitching coordinator and special assistant to general manager Neal Huntington.

Trevor Williams has blossomed into something that would make the trade for Benedict hard to justify even if he had stuck around and turned Miami into a well-oiled run-prevention machine. Searage is famous for espousing the sinker that runs inside to same-handed batters, but that approach is becoming a box into which he stuffs many pitchers whose natural stuff and skills don’t make them good candidates for it. Pittsburgh continues to develop promising power arms, but Searage is no longer getting the most out of them. He increasingly seems to have been a one-trick pony, and the league increasingly seems to have figured out his one trick. Williams may seem like an exception to all of that but this fairly-tale is about to end.

Overall, Trevor Williams is 4-1 with a 2.29 ERA over 35 innings. On the road, Williams is 2-0 with a 1.50 ERA and we cannot stress enough how poor his skills have been. One only needs to look at Trevor Williams’ profile to understand how luck plays such a massive role in the outcome of a percentage of baseball games. In 35 innings, Trevor Williams has walked 17 batters and struck out 23. Starters with ratios like that are almost always in the 5+ ERA range. This is a starter with a 7% swing and miss rate and a terrible 52% first pitch strike rate. Williams pitched a bunch of games in cold weather but now that things have warmed up considerably, his numbers are in line to get ice cold. His groundball rate (35%) is weak and his groundball/fly-ball rate in his last game was 17%/50%. This is an incredibly wobbly, overachieving arm with an xERA of 5.88 and we’re going to bet that the Nationals let loose on him.   

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Our Pick

WASHINGTON -1½ +165 (Risking 2 units - To Win: 3.30)

Baltimore -1½ +124 over L.A. Angels
San Francisco +100 over San Diego
Toronto +120 over Tampa Bay
Washington +135 over Cincinnati
San Diego under 83½ -105
Boston under 79½ -110