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Posted at 11:45 AM EST.

1:10 PM EST. Luis Castillo (RHP) is 5-8 after 21 starts with a 5.30 ERA. We cannot overstate how misleading those surface numbers are, as Castillo is a true ace that few give credit too. Castillo’s weak surface numbers are the direct result of an unfortunate low strand rate of 64%. Once that strand rate corrects itself, Castillo is going to come up with some gems and we’ll take our chance here against a Phillies’ nine that has struck out the third most times in the entire league. Castillo has a 3.83 xERA. He has struck out 101 batters in 109 innings and over his past five starts, he has walked just three batters combined over 22 innings. He’s missing bats at an elite rate also (15.9%) over his last six starts. Doing a better job of attacking hitters early in counts will help him continue his surge that few are noticing. Castillo is legit.

Meanwhile Zach Eflin Zach (RHP) presents high levels of risk here. The right-hander struggled in his recent return from the disabled list (2.2 IP, 3 ER, 5% swing and miss rate), but he has logged solid results overall this year (3.41 ERA, 1.15 WHIP) on the surface. Prior to dealing with a blister on his finger, he went 6-0 with a 1.91 ERA across a six-start stretch from June 5-July 3 but that was then and this is now. What happens when a pitcher is dealing with a nagging and annoying blister issue is that he changes his grip on the baseball to prevent it from recurring. In his last start, Eflin walked three and struck out one. Coincidence? That was his only start since coming off the DL and everything looked off. Eflin also has a 36%/42% overall groundball/fly-ball split but in his last start, his groundball/fly-ball split was 17%/58%. Coincidence? We think not. Zach Eflin has made just 13 starts this year. That blister issue may be causing a different grip but even if that’s corrected, we cannot trust him. He went 1-5 with a 6.16 ERA over 64 innings last year and this year, his 4.87 xERA is not as pretty.

PLEASE NOTE: One of the unique things about our website is that we provide write-ups every single day on every game we post. We’re not sure if everyone understands how time consuming that is and how difficult it is as well but if you do not, please try it one day and you’ll see.

That said, we’re not going to change that. We’ll have write-ups every single day like we always do but we’re also going to have another feature. You see, we post our games usually in the early afternoon or before 1:00 PM EST but there is a lot of movement and other intangibles that occur throughout the day that has influence on what we’re betting. Usually after 6:00 PM EST or thereabouts, we’re going to be adding other games that we’re betting on in a section called “add-ons” for today that we ARE NOT going to write up because it’s too time consuming and with an hour or less before the first game goes off, we just won’t have the time.

This is a feature that you will see on our home page with the other wagers and we’ll also tweet it out when our add-ons have been posted.

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