Paige Bueckers Heads to Bay Area; Where To Find An Edge in MLB

Happy Friday sports fans! Back for another weekend of summer sports action with MLB and WNBA second halves in full swing, NFL training camps underway and golf being played all weekend.

Make sure you download and listen to the Betting with Bearman podcast at Apple and Spotify, where we discuss all of this and more.

Back on Monday with a recap of the weekend and a preview of the last week of July.

Seattle Mariners (-131, Bryan Woo) at Los Angeles Angels (+108, Jose Soriano)

If you’re not familiar with Jose Soriano’s game, change that. The 26-year-old righty doesn’t yet have baseball card numbers that catch the eye of sportsbooks (career: 3.63 ERA, 1.32 WHIP, and under a strikeout per inning), but like pasta, not all greatness looks the same on the surface.

Soriano has battled control at points in his career and this season has been no different. He’s issued multiple free passes in six straight starts and, trust me, it’s as irritating as it sounds when he’s holding your money.

But the other boxes are checked in such a way that I don’t mind going back to the well. Think of him like a golfer who struggles to putt (like my Corey Conners affliction): the most variant part of the game can undo him, but the predictive things often trend in his favor.

That’s the type of profile, in any sport, that I want to get ahead of the market on. This season, the average launch angle on batted balls against Soriano is -3.7 degrees.

Yes, negative.

The term “cement mixer” is more old school than current day, but its accurate in this instance. Opponents pound the ball into the ground on a routine basis against Soriano and, in this swing-for-the-fences era, I’m all in on that skill set.

Why tonight? Well, Seattle owns the fourth lowest zone contact rate since June 1, thus giving Soriano no reason to not attack at a high level and thus mitigate the walk downside. Over three-quarters of his pitches are either slinkers or knuckle curves – the opponent largely knows what’s coming, knows what Soriano is aiming to do, and still can’t get the ball in the air. He’s coughed up just two homers over the past three months

The M’s are 8-22 this season when not homering with 15 of those losses coming by multiple runs. Soriano’s next two scheduled starts are positioned to come against the Rangers and Rays, another two below average offenses in terms of zone contact rate. Win tonight and we keep rolling over Soriano funds until this run of plus-matchups ends – we saw him rip off three straight high-level outings in the middle of June (20.2 innings, 11 hits, and two earned runs allowed) and think it’s possible we are in the midst of another strong stretch from this underappreciated arm.

Pick: Angels +108