A Coors Field Special for Friday Night

Welcome to August! It’s my birth month and it’s when football takes center stage, so we love August. Hope everyone enjoyed the first NFL game of the season last night even if you were smart and passed on the betting. It’s way too early for that!

For today and this weekend, we have plenty of MLB and WNBA to bet on, golf to monitor and we even threw in a NASCAR Iowa play for one of our loyal Betting with Bearman followers.

Remember to download and listen to the Betting with Bearman podcast at Apple and Spotify, We released our College Football betting preview under our new presenting sponsor FanDuel Sportsbook! Give it a listen!

Pittsburgh Pirates (-143, Andrew Heaney) at Colorado Rockies (+118, Antonio Senzatela)

Yeah, I know, everyone wanted another Jose Soriano play. That will have to wait until he pitches again next week. If only we got him every day.

For today, we have a “juicy” Pirates/Rockies matchup that you’d only be interested in if you found an edge to bet on it. Why else would you watch this matchup?!

If you want a litmus test for if a bad offense can hit bad pitching in an optimal scoring atmosphere, you’ve got it. Outside of this being an interesting case study, I do think there’s an angle to play, understanding that you’re playing with fire no matter how you ‘cap this one.

In July, both the Pirates and Rockies were bottom-5 offenses in terms of average launch angle, a flaw that obviously makes maximizing the spoils of Coors Field an uphill battle.

Nobody in their right mind is going to argue that either of these starting pitchers is a comfortable person to trust with your hard earned dollars, but the combination of ballooned run expectations due to the location with hitters that can’t elevate the ball has me interested.

Over his last 10 home starts, Senzatela has faced three top-10 offenses in launch angle. To the surprise of no one, those outings were a mess (14 earned runs allowed in 14 innings), but the other seven? The other seven were palatable (4.26 ERA with the three most recent such games seeing him cough up just five earned runs in 18.1 innings).

Baby steps.

I’m not asking for him to be Cy Young, I just need ordinary and given the matchup, I think there’s a decent chance of that pitcher who has course corrected some of the control issues that plagued him earlier in the season (2.1 walks per nine innings in July, less than half of the 4.5 number he held from the beginning of May to the end of June).

His opposing pitcher showed some signs of life last weekend (five shutout innings against Arizona) and is the type of crafty vet that could have success in this spot. Heaney has over 1,100 innings pitched on his MLB resume and that experience should help him expose the only offense in the league swings at more pitches than they let go.

This season, opponents are hitting .163 against Heaney in two strike counts and .3333 otherwise.

Both of these starters are on normal rest and both of these teams had yesterday off. We are not calling for a 1-0 game in a park that has seen more cycles than pitchers duels at that level. Just asking for these starters to delay the fireworks long enough to put some lunch money in my pocket for the weekend. Give me under 3.5 runs though the first three innings (-110) in the thin Denver air tonight. Our friend and former colleague, Mr. Scott Van Pelt, would say “This is a hold your nose type bet”. Maybe there’s a good Disney movie to watch!