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Posted at 6:00 PM EST.

St. Louis +109 over N.Y. Mets

7:45 PM EST. The Cardinals were quietly on their way to spoiling a very Max Scherzer start—seven innings with 10 strikeouts, one walk, and two runs allowed—thanks to the Mets’ offense, which had been held scoreless by starter Miles Mikolas for seven innings and then a 1-2-3 eighth by Génesis Cabrera. The ninth began innocently enough, as well: closer Giovanny Gallegos got Pete Alonso to fly out to begin the frame, and while Eduardo Escobar hit a single, Robinson Cano would then fly out, too. The Cardinals were one out from victory, until they were not.

Cardinals’ third baseman Nolan Arenado made an unnecessarily off-balance, cross-diamond throw to first base that sailed over Paul Goldschmidt’s glove, allowing a runner to round third and score to make it 2-1 instead of game over. Arenado had time to set his feet and throw—even with all of the extra steps he took before the throw, Mark Canha wasn’t going to beat it had it just been on target—but, as Mets’ announcer Ron Darling pointed out, Arenado just kept taking steps and then winged it over to first instead of giving himself the time to be accurate. Things would get weirder and worse for the Cards. Jeff McNeil would double, putting runners on second and third. Dominic Smith then pinch-hit for Tomas Nido, and drove what ended up being the winning run across home plate with an infield hit. No, really. An infield hit scored two. The last time the gold glove extraordinaire Nolan Arenado made an error in the 9th inning to cost his team a win was 782 games ago. You see, we have to get really unlucky to lose while others have to get lucky to win and now the market is buying up the Mets again. Enough with our rant. Sometimes it’s a good catharsis. We’re not complaining because the next best thing to gambling and winning is gambling and losing.

As for this one, we’re simply sticking with it and taking the home underdog Cardinals again. Today it’ll be Chris Bassitt (RHP - NYM) against Jordan Hicks (RHP - ST. L). Bassitt is looking fine with four walks issued and 20 K’s in 18 innings. In three starts, he’s been very good twice and not so good once. Thing is, he thrived against Arizona and Washington before getting whacked by the Giants so one cannot put much emphasis on two starts against two bad teams. Last year, Bassitt missed just over a month after taking a line drive to the head in mid-August. He failed to duplicate his 2020 career "year," but he didn't give it all back, either, thanks to K-BB% uptick to career-best levels. He now owns a track record of beating his xERA across multiple years running, but next step in ERA is still more likely toward 4.00 rather than 3.00.

Jordan Hicks is someone that’s likely to get a lot of press over the next few weeks because he possesses what is known as a “live arm”. There’s reasons to fade him and there’s reason to play him, so for now, he’ll be very playable as a home dog and certainly worth fading as a big favorite. Today, he’s the former. The reasons to fade is a history of high walk rates, Tommy John surgery (2019), opt-out (2020), more elbow woes (2021). In other words, he’s been limited. However, he has a triple-digit fastball and an off the charts groundball rate of 70% that he has maintained for a long time in his minor league career and also in his first taste of the majors. Let’s see what happens.