Gray Skies For Dodger Blue

M is back after a couple days off and has lots to catch up on.  First it's a recap of Sat's extra innings win and Sunday's shut out loss. Then he moves on to some general Dodgers info (it's not good) before addressing tonight's excellent pitching matchup between Yamamoto and Roupp.  He discusses the difficulty of coming up with SBOD's when the Giants are losing games.  That leads in to tonight's Safe Bet of the Day™, and that leads to an overview of how the SBOD's have done so far this year.  Back on track. Before calling it a day, M leaves you with a song of the day ("Here" by Mumford and Sons). Enjoy!

Transcript

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San Francisco Giants pre game podcast. Preview previews, pre giants, and pre gift before every Giants game. Good morning and welcome back into the pod. It is Tuesday morning, April 21st, and it seems like a long time since we've done this because it has been three days. Yesterday was the off day, Sunday was the early morning game, and I was out of town, and I did the pod early Saturday before that game. So it's been uh feels like it's been forever. So buckle up, we got a lot to talk about today. Starting off with the recap of the two games over the weekend on Saturday. It was the wild extra inning game, extra innings game where the Giants won in 12, which was unbelievable. We had the Giants money line as a safe bet of the day, so that did come in, which was good, but boy, it could have easily I mean, the fact that they had bases loaded against us in the 10th with Ryan Walker on the mound, and we didn't lose that. Felt like we dodged a bullet on that one. So that was good to see that come in, see the Giants get the win. And then Sunday was the early morning game with uh was it Ray? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was the Robbie Ray and Miles Michaelis. And I had said on Saturday before the weekend that I was leaning toward taking the Giants money line because it was Ray and Michaelis, but I was thinking the number might be bad. You might have to jump to the run line, etc., etc. And then after Saturday night's or Saturday's game that night, I went on and looked, and the money line for Sunday's game was only minus 130. So I jumped on that Giants money line minus 30, thinking, oh, okay, that's good, much better than I thought it was going to be. The run line was plus 125, or and then even the first five Giants money line I kind of liked, but I ended up going with the Giants money line like I had suggested. But then when I went to look at the loss the next day, yesterday, because it would have been a loss, the the bet was canceled because the Nationals didn't start Michaelis. They brought the opener in Poolan or whatever his name is first. And so all the bets were canceled, at least the two that I had were canceled because Michaelis had to be the starter. So I guess that's just a push because I was thinking if it would have been a win and they got canceled, I would have felt bad calling it a win because no one would have got the win. So since it was a loss, I guess I think I'm just gonna call it a push because it was canceled, it was a push. So if we call that a push, then we'll just call it as one and oh over the weekend. And I'll get back to that again when I talk about the safe better the day updates when we do that at the end of the pod today. So that brings us to today's game, which after the four and five road trip for the Giants, and then they won the series in DC, and they're kind of feeling a little bit better, but now they got to come and face the Dodgers, who are 15 and 6 after their 22 games. And you know, if you've been watching it all, you know how good they are. Their offense is good, their pitching is good, all around, just a team that's gonna be tough. Now they are in, I guess I was gonna say the middle, but it's more toward the beginning of 13 games in 13 days for the Dodgers. They just had four in Colorado, now they come here for the next three, the fifth, sixth, and seventh of that. So they got a long stretch ahead of them right here. But, you know, as you probably know, if you look at any of the categories, the offensive categories, they're pretty much first in everything. Batting average, they have a 289. On base percentage, they're first with 363, home runs at 37, slugging percentage 494. All of those are first where the Giants are 23rd, 29th, 24th, those kinds of things. So they're much better in all the offensive categories than the Giants, obviously, since they're first. And even in the pitching categories, where you would hope they they would have a little bit of a lentoff, it's not the case. Their batting average against is first at 206. The whip is second at 1.11. For comparison's sake, the Giants are 14 and 15 right in the middle of the pack in those categories. So it's pretty bad that they got number one in pitching, I mean, in all of their offensive hitting categories and up toward the top in all of the pitching categories. I did hear a little bit of recent bullpen concern because they just did put Edwin Diaz on the IL because he, I think it was an elbow injury. He had had a couple of bad outings before that, so they knew something was wrong, so they put him on the I. L. So that might weaken the bullpen just a touch, but still their bullpen has been pretty good throughout the year. For tonight's game, they have Yamamoto on the mound against Landon Roop. And if you don't know much about Yamamoto, he is a fairly young 27-year-old from Japan. He's only been a couple years in the league. He came up in 24, he only pitched 18 games for the Dodgers, but did really well, had a 3.0 ERA, 105 strikeouts in 90 innings. He does have a high strikeout rate. But then in 25, he had a full season last year, 30 games, and again, even better. 2.49 ERA, a 0.99 whip. Let's see. He had 201 strikeouts in 173 innings. So again, a high strikeout rate, not very many walks. And this year, he's done even better than that. He's had four games so far, 2.10 ERA. He's had a little luck. He should probably be four and oh right now. He's had a didn't get support in a couple of his games, but here's what he's had so far: two earned runs in six innings, two earned runs in six innings, one earned run in six innings, and one earned run in seven and two thirds innings. Pretty impressive. If you look at his walks, he's given up this year zero, one, one, and one. Excellent. His strikeouts have been six, two, six, and seven. So that's very good. Again, he's getting at least one every inning, if not more. So, like I said, he should probably be four and oh right now. He's also coming off of six days of rest. So I have a feeling he is gonna make it tough on the Giants. He's made it tough on everybody. And then so the Giants have Roop on the mound, and as you know, he is one of my main guys. Him and Ray, I've been harping on all year. And if you look at Roop's numbers, if you take out he had one bad outing out out of his four outings, if you take that out, his numbers are actually better than Yamamoto, which is hard to believe. His other three games, he had zero earned runs in six innings with seven strikeouts, one earned run in six innings, and zero earned runs in six innings. So he's only given up one earned run in three games, 18 innings, other than the one bad game that he had. He averages about two walks per outing as opposed to one for Yamamoto. So what we have tonight is two top pitchers, and I'm predicting it's going to be tough to get hits. Runs are going to be at a premium. It is going to be a low-scoring game. We've had a ton of rain out here the last couple days. So it shows that it's going to be cleared up for game time, but it's going to have been raining before, it's going to rain after. The field's going to be wet. It's going to be cold, misty, overcast, that kind of thing. Also, both bullpins should be fresh because the Giants had the day off yesterday and the Dodgers didn't hardly use any bullpen because they were up 10 to 3. Well, they ended up winning 12 to 3 yesterday. They were up so big, so they didn't use any anything major out of their bullpen. So I'm going to put all that together and I'm going to get to today's safe bet of the day. And before the before I was looking at them, I'm thinking there's no way I'm going to find a good game today or a good pick today. They've got Yamamoto on the mind on the mound. I just don't like the Giants' chances in general against the Dodgers. They're going to have a tough fight the whole way through. So I was just not sure I was going to be able to find anything. It's going to be a close game. Both pitchers are good. I think the pitchers are going to stay fairly even. The pull pins could stay even. This is actually the one game that I think the Giants might have a chance to maybe pull one out because if Rube can stay even with Yamamoto and the bullpins can stay, and our bullpen has been good lately, and they've had a day off. So if they can keep it even, this might be the chance for a Giants to pull out a win. I was leaning toward all the unders at first because of the situation, but the over-under was seven. And man, that seemed really I was at least hoping for a seven and a half. The money line was obviously the Giants are like 150 or something like that because it's heavily favored toward the Dodgers. I kind of did like the Giants run line at minus 115 because then they only even if they did lose, if they could stay within one run, that would cover. Or the first five run line is minus 105. They would just have to be even after five runs. And so that's one I liked also. But then I finally found a couple that I do actually like. One, the first one I liked was the Dodgers getting under four and a half runs. Because I think they're gonna have, even though they score a lot of runs, this is the one matchup that I think they will have trouble with because of Roop and because of the fresh bullpins, and because they've just had to travel. They had the late night last night in Colorado and had to travel all night, get here at three in the morning. So they might be fatigued a little bit today. This is the this is the game that I think the Dodgers might struggle with, all put all that together. But the under four and a half was minus 135. And so that seemed a little too juicy, even though we've done one of those on accident once before. But the other one I liked, I also kind of liked no runs in the first, given the pitchers, but that's minus 148, so I'm not gonna throw that out there. But then the one I came across that I can actually live with is total hits under 15 and a half. It's minus 125, which is still a little juicy, but not as bad as the four and a half runs. And they're fairly correlated, obviously. If the Dodgers get under four and a half runs, they probably didn't get that many hits. Then the Giants against Yamamoto, I'm assuming probably won't get that many hits. So I'm gonna go with the under 15 and a half hits, minus 125 as today's safe bet of the game. And like I said, I'm basing it on the fatigue, the pitchers, the bullpen, the weather, hard-to-hit home runs at Oracle, all that together. I think it's gonna be a low-scoring, tough to get hits type of game. So that will be today's safe bet of the day. And what before I go, I want to give an update because I don't know, we're 22 games in, had a little break yesterday, so I thought I'd give everyone kind of an update on the safe bets of the day. And if I call Sunday's game a push because they were all canceled, we had a push on the very first game of the year. We had over under seven, it came out five to two, so that was a push. So there's been 20 other games, 22 total games. We've had two pushes, 20 other games. We are now 10 and 10 in those 20 games. So we are minus one unit's worth of juice. If you've been paying attention, we started out pretty good. We were three and one in the first four, and we've been three and one in the last four, actually, seven and four in the last 11. What happened is we had a six-game losing streak right in the middle that really hurt. And we had a couple of really bad beats in there. The one Robbie Ray won, where they pulled him one out early, where he's coming up against a righty, it didn't make any sense. So, anyway, that six-game losing streak really hurt us, and then we've been slowly clawing our way back to even since then, and we got back to 10, 10, and 2 after this weekend. So, actually, I'm pretty happy with that because it's the fact that it's better than the Giants record, and it's hard to pick out winners when the team you're trying to pick from is losing every game. That's why we're having to pick out things like hits and how many innings a pitcher's gonna go, and first fives, and things like that. So I feel good about our record, I feel good about our progress since Aiden and I kind of made some changes. That's when we've gone seven and four. We were doing too many first fives because we were concerned about the bullpen and some other things. So, since we made our couple of changes, we're seven and four. Feel good about that going forward. So I wanted to just get you that update. Literally 10 and 10 out of the 20 games that have had an outcome of some sort. So, not too bad. And we're doing better lately, and I feel like we're gonna get on to the positive side here soon. So, anyway, that's everything going forward with Safe Bet of the Day. What I don't like going forward is this three-game series with the Dodgers. It's gonna be tough to find picks in this series, especially they've got Otani on the mound tomorrow. That's gonna be tough. So, anyway, I guess that's what I want to leave you with. The update with Safe Bet of the Days. We will be trying to pick out some more kind of winners this series, which might be tough to do, but we'll see if we can do it. Or they're gonna be kind of like today's, where we're picking outs or strikeouts or things like that. So, just heads up going forward. Tomorrow's game is 6.45 again. It is Tyler Malley against Sheho Otani. That just does not seem like a fair fight, like I told Aiden Man, their best pitcher against one of ours that's kind of struggling. So it will be interesting to see if we can pick out some kind of safe bet of the day that we feel good about tomorrow. Because I do feel good about today's considering it's the Dodgers and the Giants are uh shuffling and scuffling as much as they are. I I didn't think I'd be able to pick one out, but I did, I do like the one we picked out for today. So I think that is all my notes. Oh, one other note I have. In case you guys want to hear a good new song, my daughter sent me a playlist the other day and it had this song on it. It's by Mumford Sons with Chris Stapleton. It's called Here. H-E-R-E. Look it up on Spotify, your Apple Music, whatever, you're gonna like it. It's the song of the day today. It goes with the safe better day. It doesn't really go with it in any way, but we'll call it a song of the day for today. With that, that is all I have. Tune in tomorrow where we will recap tonight's game. We will look at tomorrow's matchup between Otani and Molly, see if we can find something to pick out of there. Until then, keep your eyes up, keep your eyes moving, stay safe, and go dime.