NBA Postseason Best Bets (5/3)
Alex Christenson
Wednesday’s MLB schedule is exactly what baseball should have as often as possible. The first game starts at 1:15 p.m. ET, the last game starts at 8:40 p.m., and there isn’t likely to be a single minute in between first pitch of the day and last pitch when there are zero games being played. Yo, MLB: At least one day game every day. Everyone wants this.
Anyway, with 15 games to choose from, identifying just the right bets for the Wednesday slate is a tough ask. Below are the ones I landed on for my MLB best bets of the day. The odds change pretty quickly in the MLB, so take advantage of our Prop Shop for the best possible odds and check out our Pick Tracker for the key picks from around FTN.
MLB Best Bets for Wednesday
Spencer Turnbull Over 15.5 Outs Recorded
+120, BetMGM
Turnbull’s off to an electric start to the 2024 season, like … well, pretty much all the Phillies’ starters. The five members of the starting rotation have taken every turn so far, and they’ve put up a 2.22 ERA combined. And that ERA includes Cristopher Sánchez sitting at 2.96 after going only three innings Tuesday, thanks to allowing 7 baserunners and 5 runs in 3 innings, thanks to 4 of those runs being unearned. But because Sánchez went so short, the bullpen was taxes, with Yunior Marte throwing 2 innings and Orion Kerkering, Matt Strahm and Ricardo Pinto each going 1. The one-inning pitchers each went 11 or 12 pitches, so they aren’t necessarily boxed out for Wednesday’s game, but the Phillies/Reds series goes to Thursday, so Philly doesn’t have a day off until next Thursday. You don’t want to burn relievers in this game when you’re going to need them several times over the next week.
St. Louis’ Kyle Gibson is in a similar situation to Turnbull Wednesday, taking the bump for a team that is going to want the starter to go deep. But his Outs Recorded prop of 17.5 requires him to finish six innings. Turnbull’s only requires him to get one out in the sixth, which he’s done twice in his four starts, with at least 80 pitches in all four of his starts. Expect him to flirt with a quality start in this one, and even if he struggles, the team is going to leave him out there as long as it can justify.
Ezequiel Tovar Over 1.5 Total Bases
-145, DraftKings Sportsbook
There’s no juice on this bet, which is the main thing working against it. Working for it? Tovar has played every inning of every game so far this season, working up a .312/.356/.473 slash line and hitting this prop in four of his last six games, with one of the fails coming in the second game of a doubleheader when the first game went extra innings, which doesn’t really matter, but I’m open to giving a guy some credit for being tired by the end of a 19-inning day.
Tovar gets to face Matt Waldron Wednesday. Waldron is the closest thing we have to a pure knuckleballer in the game these days, throwing it about one-third of the time. As our Jake Kucheck noted in Wednesday’s DFS First Look, “knuckleball in Colorado” is asking for it — the pitch needs wind and humidity, and in Coors Fields Wednesday we definitely aren’t getting the latter and likely aren’t getting the former. That sets Tovar up to get this prop knocked out with a double as early as the first inning, and even if not, he’s likely to get at least 5 plate appearances to get there in a game that promises to be high scoring.
