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Posted at 11:45 AM EST.

9:40 PM EST. As far as “aces” go, Zack Greinke (RHP) does not get the same respect as others but make no mistake that he’s still tough as shoe leather. Greinke is getting more swing and misses from both his slider and change-up to elevate his K’s (143 K’s in 137 IP) to regain 200-K status. Dude has only walked 24 batters too so his command is as good as ever. Greinke has posted the second-highest xERA of his career this season and that xERA is off the charts at 2.44 over his last five starts. He’ll now face a Giants team that is old, slow and losing lots of games.

We looked deeply into Madison Bumgarner (LHP) last week and suggested a rough road ahead and we’re not coming off that position. Our attack on MadBum will continue here.

No matter the fielding independent pitching statistic to which you subscribe — ERA, xERA, SIERA, Bumgarner’s 2018 has not inspired confidence. Despite a dazzling 3.06 ERA, his baserunner suppression skills (i.e. strikeouts and walks) have lagged this year, and his 4.82 xERA all portend severe bumps in the road. Granted, Bumgarner has outperformed his xERA before but not like this year and now all the red flags are there to put the fade tag on MadBum, as the potentially serious concerns about his health and success are real.

The problems with Bumgarner’s 2018 season — or at least the peripherals that underpin his 2018 season — stem back not to his broken finger but, rather, something both farther back and much more dire. You may or may not recall Bumgarner fell off a dirt bike last year and injured his throwing shoulder. He returned from that injury almost exactly a year ago and promptly underwhelmed us. Sure, he posted a 3.43 ERA through September and has a 3.23 ERA in the calendar year since his return. It’s not vintage Bumgarner, as his strikeout rate has caved dramatically, falling more than six percentage points while his walk rate is getting worse by the week. Bumgarner used to be one of the best at getting hitters to swing and miss at stuff in and outside the zone but that’s getting worse by the week too. Plate discipline splits show that hitters are making contact on in-zone fastballs more than 95% of the time. That’s really bad. Coupled with significantly fewer chased pitches, it’s apparent the fastball no longer has any deceptive qualities to it. This is his primary pitch we’re talking about, a pitch that has fallen dramatically from grace, from being legitimately plus to legitimately minus during what might be expected to be his peak years. The old baseball adage says that when your fastball goes, so, too, does your effectiveness. .

Madbum’s pitching shoulder was badly hurt. His velocity is also down and he appears to be getting progressively worse with each passing start and he really wasn’t that good to begin with since the accident. Bumgarner is attuned to the fact his fastball has been failing him. Having thrown the pitch 48% of the time in 2016, he threw it only 41% of the time in the latter half of 2017 and has scaled it back even further this year to 38%. We are absolutely going to trust that the Bumgarner we see from here onward will be pretty different from the one to whom we’re accustomed. He can try to get by with diminished fastball velocity and effectiveness, but it’s very much like the continual nightmare unfolding in real time of Felix Hernandez’s diminished velocity and his monumentally failed attempt at reclaiming his former glory. Once the wheels fell of the cart, it stopped moving. The King, like Bumgarner, had the requisite secondary stuff to get by, but once the fastball broke, it was all over. It’s possible that, at 28, with a few more months of rehabilitation, his shoulder (and, subsequently, his fastball) heals. He could return to form, at least as defined by his underlying skills, and continue to build an airtight case for the Hall of Fame. However, we have seen shoulder injuries completely debilitate once-excellent pitchers and at least for now, Bumgarner’s underlying skills, which include a weak batted ball profile of 37% grounders, 25% line-drives and 38% fly-balls and a 4.82 xERA suggest strongly his results this year are more fluke than fact. Until further notice, sell Bumgarner and watch the profits roll in.

Incidentally, Bumgarner has struggled on the road this season, with a 5.06 ERA in four starts. He allowed only 2 ER in 6 IP against Arizona on June 5, but that was in San Francisco. He now has the difficult task of facing the Diamondbacks in Chase Field. Where they hit LHP well, with the NL's 5th-best OPS.

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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