Bats To Get Louder Tonight

M predicts quiet Giants bats get louder in tonight's game. After a brief recap of yesterday's tough loss, he delves into tonight's pitching matchup and why he thinks, counterintuitively, that the Giants will score runs tonight and actually win.  That leads him to the odds and an explanation for today's Safe Bet of the Day™.  Yes, it all sounds a little crazy, but that's baseball.

Transcript

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Good morning and welcome back into the pod. It is April 15th, Wednesday morning, tax day today. Hopefully, you got your taxes paid. Hopefully, you're all squared up with Uncle Sam. More squared up than the Giants bats have been lately because they cannot seem to barrel up a ball no matter what it takes. Another frustrating loss again last night for the Giants. Makes for a three-game losing streak. Robbie Ray had a good outing, only gave up two hits. If you would have told me before the game that Robbie Ray was only going to give up two hits and that our pitchers were only going to give up three hits in the entire game, I would have been thinking we would be having chicken dinner because there's no way that could not be a winner. But unfortunately, our offense can not score. They only got the one run, not even enough to overcome the two solo home runs that Ray gave up. Now, if you look at our offensive numbers, we are last in walks and last in home runs. And if you're not getting walks and not hitting home runs, that means the only way to score is through hits, singles, doubles. And you got to be able to bunch those together to be able to score runs. And that's as tough to do because if you're relying only on hits without walks and home runs for support, you're not going to score that many runs. And you can see that's what's happening with the Giants because we get a hit every now and then or two, but it's hard to get three, four, or five hits in a row. So that those numbers are not good. Now, unfortunately, there will not be any Aiden podcast today or any Aiden analysis. But I did talk to him for a while yesterday after last night's game, and we discussed a couple of mistakes that we think we've been making, and we're going to try to fix those going forward. So we'll see how it works out over the next few days. Although that doesn't really apply to tonight's game as much. But anyway, we'll see going forward. And speaking of tonight's game, once again, the Giants are in Cincinnati facing the old Red Legs, and they have today on the mound a pitcher named Rhett Lauder. Now he's an interesting guy, he was the seventh overall pick in 2023. Obviously, big credentials, they're expecting big things out of him. He came up in 2024 and had six starts at the end of that year and did great, a 1.17 ERA. So they really had high hopes for him at that point. And then he got an injury elbow and or an injury to his elbow and missed all of 2025. Didn't pitch at all, missed the whole year. Came back this year, has had three starts. In the first two, he looked great. Two runs over the 11 innings, six hits, nine strikeouts. So he looked pretty good. But in his last outing, he finally had a bad one. Not so good. Gave up five runs over five and a third, eight hits, only two strikeouts. So I'm not quite sure if that's the aberration, if we can expect that again, or if he is going to be really tough on the Giants like he was his first starts. At first, I thought for sure that was an aberration. You know, everybody has a bad start, and you know, here comes another guy, another young guy that's gonna mow the Giants down. But then I did a little bit of Aiden-like research and looked up this one stat, and I noticed that his sinker and his fastball, his main two pitches that he throws are actually league average or a little bit below league average. So I'm thinking, and if you look at the style of pitcher he is, he's the kind of pitcher that the Giants can actually hit. So I'm actually positive and feel good about this matchup today. We have Tyler Malley on the mound, and he has been good for the Giants. He's had three starts, been really good in two of them, and bad in one of them. He has been better than expected. 14 innings, 14 and two-thirds innings overall, 15 strikeouts, seven earned runs. And I think even though he might give up a couple of runs to the Reds, if you look at the Reds, in the last 10 games, they're batting 202. So I think this is an offense that he should be able to keep down as well or better than who he's faced in the past. So after at first, I was thinking, oh boy, we got this young guy against us when Tyler Malley, we're gonna get blown out again. But the more that I've looked into this matchup, the more I am starting to like it. And at first I was expecting a low-scoring game. Like yesterday, I liked the under yesterday. It came in easily. And at first I was expecting something similar to that today. But after looking at these pictures, I think maybe it's not gonna be the same today. I think tomorrow with Roop and Chase Burns on the mound, it might be similar to yesterday's game. But I'm expecting a little bit different today. And it's gonna sound counterintuitive because of the way the Giants have been playing, but I'm gonna go in a different direction for today's safe bet of the day. Now, before after last night's game, I made my notes, and here's the notes. It was look at the under because of the pictures and the bull pins, and the offenses are bad. So for sure, I'm looking at the unders. I see it's under nine, actually, nine, and it was nine, and then it went up to nine and a half. So I was like, oh man, that's a good one. I really like the under. I like the first five under five, all those unders at first. And then after I took some time to look at the pitchers and look at the matchups, I kind of changed my mind because I think this is, I know it's gonna sound odd, but I really think this is a game the Giants are gonna win. I think Malley is a little underrated. I think this louder guy is gonna be a little overrated. I think the Giants bullpen is starting to regress back to where it should be. It looked so bad at first that I was leaving it out of all of our picks, but I think it's better than I was given it credit for. And I think the Giants are gonna score runs today, which is crazy to say. I know it sounds unbelievable because they scored one yesterday and they're there they haven't scored very many, but I think given the given the picture they're facing, given the ballpark, it's supposed to be a nice warm night. It just seems like the ball's gonna fly today. So I kind of like I started leaning not to the over necessarily, but to the Giants over. And both the Giants over four and a half runs, I like, I like the Giants in the first five. But what I'm gonna make as the official play for today for the safe bet of the day is straight up Giants money line. It's minus 107. So the books have the game pretty evenly matched, and I think they've got it wrong. I think the the reason they have it evenly matched is because they think the Giants aren't gonna score, and that the Reds aren't gonna score because both offensives are so bad. But I think the Giants are gonna score enough runs. I think the Giants are gonna get four, five, six runs tonight, and I'm just hoping that that'll be enough and that Malley and our bullpen can keep the Reds under that. So I'm gonna make that the safe bet of the day. The Giants money line up minus 107. Let's see. I think that is all of my notes. I believe it is. Tomorrow's game is an early one, 9:40 a.m. out here on the Pacific. So I'm gonna try to get up and have this out by 7 or so that you so that you can have something to listen to on your way into work in the morning. Always good to start off the day with a winner. So check it early, tune in early, start tomorrow off right, and start today off right by staying safe out there, by having a wonderful, peaceful day, and as always, go giants.