MLB Baseball Betting: Cincinnati Reds at St. Louis Cardinals

National League Central rivals face off in Monday baseball action as the Cincinnati Reds travel to the ‘Gateway City’ to take on the St. Louis Cardinals. With the NCAA basketball finals certain to dominate the attention of sports fans on Monday night there’s several daytime games on today’s card including this game starting at 1:15 PM Pacific. After a week of the 2013 Major League Baseball season these teams are ‘neck and neck’ atop the division and are expected to set the pace throughout the summer.

Both teams are coming off of impressive victories on Sunday–the Cards bludgeoned the San Francisco Giants at AT&T Park by a 14-3 score while the Reds had little trouble with the Washington Nationals and ace Steven Strasburg at home winning 6-3. There’s a chance the Cards could feel the impact of travel to some degree having to fly back from the West Coast to play an afternoon game. Currently the Reds hold a 1 game lead atop the NL Central with a 4-2 mark while the Cards are right behind at 3-3. The Cards will start lefhander Jamie Garcia who looked very sharp in his first start of the season pitching 5 2/3 innings of 2 hit, 1 ER baseball and earning a win against the Arizona Diamondbacks. Latos wasn’t quite as impressive and left without a decision in his first start of the year which the Reds went on to win.

In recent years this has been an evenly matched series–the Reds have won 16 of the last 30 head to head meetings for a +3.6 unit profit overall. The Cards do have an advantage at home, winning 9 of the last 15 games but that translates to a mere 1/2 unit of profit. At this early juncture in the season we try to extrapolate from situational characteristics teams displayed last year and there are a couple of these that put us squarely on the Reds. Cincinnati was a solid moneymaker on the road in 2012 finishing up +10.5 units. St. Louis, on the other hand, was overvalued in many situation and one of their worst spots was against right handers. The Cardinals dropped almost 16 units (-15.9) against right handed pitching last season despite putting up good numbers from both sides of the plate. Overall, we’re just not sold on this St. Louis team while Cincinnati remains relatively undervalued.

BET CINCINNATI REDS (LATOS) +100 OVER ST. LOUIS CARDINALS (GARCIA)