Baseball Betting Picks: San Francisco Giants at Chicago Cubs

The San Francisco Giants will try to take control of the NL West as they conclude a four game series against the Chicago Cubs. The Giants have won two of the first three games and will look to improve to 9-4 on the season with a win here. San Francisco will start former Cy Young winner Tim Lincecum and he’s still a question mark. He did get things together somewhat after a shabby start to the 2012 season but has yet to regain his dominant form of years past. The Cubs will counter with Edwin Jackson who hasn’t done much this year at all losing both of his starts and posting a 5.73 ERA.

The defending World Champions have been very consistent this season–they’ve only lost back to back games once this season. They haven’t exactly been knocking the cover off the ball, but they have such good pitching and defense they can get away with it. They should be able to improve their offensive numbers against Edwin Jackson who has been mediocre at best this year and especially ineffective at home where he’s got an ERA of 7.50.

Chicago may be even worse this year than their 4-7 indicates. They took 2 of 3 in their opening series against Pittsburgh but have lost 6 of their 8 games since. The word on the street about the Cubs is that they may have to ‘get worse’ this year in order to get better–a scary proposition for a team that lost 101 games a year ago. Year after year, betting against the Cubs–particularly at home–has been a veritable ATM machine. If you had blindly bet against the Chicago Cubs in every game since 1997 you would have made a whopping +263.1 units of profit. A good chunk of that has come at Wrigley Field where going against the Cubs in every game since 1997 would have produced profits of -147.8 units. The marketplace may be catching up to this fact at least somewhat but since the public still loves the Cubs they remain a good team to bet against–over the last three years blindly betting against the Cubs has been good for a profit of +44.7 units.

Simply put, the Giants are the better team and we’re getting them at a good price. Even without Buster Posey in the Giants’ lineup (he’s getting a ‘rest’ day) San Francisco should be able to take care of business.

BET SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS (LINCECUM) -110 OVER CHICAGO CUBS (JACKSON)