{"id":16502,"date":"2011-07-19T00:48:45","date_gmt":"2011-07-19T05:48:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.madduxsports.com\/blog\/?p=16502"},"modified":"2011-07-19T00:48:45","modified_gmt":"2011-07-19T05:48:45","slug":"nl-betting-st-louis-cardinals-at-new-york-mets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.madduxsports.com\/blog\/nl-betting-st-louis-cardinals-at-new-york-mets-16502\/","title":{"rendered":"NL Betting: St. Louis Cardinals At New York Mets"},"content":{"rendered":"

Saint Louis Cardinals (50-45) AT New York Mets (47-48)<\/strong>
\nJuly 19, 2011 at 7:10 PM EST<\/strong>
\nOpening Line:\u00a0 NYM -125, STL +105<\/strong>
\nCurrent Line:\u00a0 NYM -120, STL +100<\/strong>
\nOpening Total:\u00a0 8<\/strong>
\nCurrent Total: 8<\/strong><\/p>\n

SP:\u00a0 STL- Kyle Lohse; NYM- Dillon Gee<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"
Reyes is hitting .354 on the season<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It’s always darkest before dawn, and the Mets are hoping that their offense will have some life injected into it when Jose Reyes and Carlos Beltran come back tonight.\u00a0 Jose Reyes had been sidelined since the 2nd of July with a bad hamstring and Beltran missed three games with the flu.\u00a0 The two were the lone All-Star representatives for the Mets, but trade rumors have surrounded both players.<\/p>\n

Reyes hit 1 of 3 in rehab work at single-A Brooklyn, and still leads the majors with a .354 average.\u00a0 His average over .70 better than last season and he has already hit more triples this year, 15, than he did all of last year with 10.\u00a0 He’s also only struck out 26 times in 350 plate appearances.\u00a0 Six of his last seven games have been multi-hit games, as well.<\/p>\n

The Mets have dropped five of their last six games and managed only 3 hits in a makeup game Monday night.\u00a0 In all four of those games, they managed less than 2 runs, and all four\u00a0 were losses.\u00a0 In the 15 games that Jose Reyes was on the DL, his replacements hit .197.<\/p>\n

\u201cAny team in this league that loses guys like that are going to have a tough time getting offense generated,\u201d Mets’ manager Terry Collins resigned himself to say. \u201cBut we still have to plug away and put the ball in play and spread the ball around and run the bases a little bit better and be aggressive on the bases, and we just didn\u2019t do that (Monday).\u201d<\/p>\n

What might be best of all for the Mets with the all-star duo returning is the way they have played against the Cardinals.\u00a0 Reyes is hitting .382 in his last six home games against the Cards, while Beltran is at .517 with two homers and 9 RBIs, over his last seven.\u00a0 Against Kyle Lohse, Beltran has gone 20 of 37 with 4 HRs.<\/p>\n

And it’s not that Lohse is a bad pitcher, because he isn’t\u00a0 His ERA is in the low threes (3.32) and he has a winning record at 8-6.\u00a0 In his last four starts against the Mets on the road, however, he has gone 0-3 with a 10.38 ERA.\u00a0 On August 5th 2009, Lohse gave up 5 runs in 2 2\/3rds innings work, as the Mets were defeated 9 to nothing.\u00a0 He has lost four of his last five decisions after starting the season 7-2.\u00a0 In fact, after his first 9 games, he boasted an ERA of 2.41.<\/p>\n

Lohse in many senses is still riding on the coattails of his own success in 2008, when he went 15-6 with a 3.78 ERA.\u00a0 His WHIP in 2009 was about the same (1.39 to 1.32), but his ERA went up nearly a full run, somewhat paradoxically.<\/p>\n

This season Baseball Prospectus expected a 10-11 record with a 4.75 ERA.\u00a0 Lohse was horrible last year at 4-8 with a 6.55 ERA.\u00a0 His arm, however, has been weakened by surgery and age, and his stuff certainly isn’t as good as it used to be.\u00a0 At this point, he is no longer a top of the rotation player, but should remain effective enough to start for a couple more seasons, at least.<\/p>\n

Lohse attributes the problems to his location of the ball, but that really isn’t all there is to it, obviously:<\/p>\n

\u201cJust location,\u201d Lohse self-assessed.\u00a0 \u201cThat\u2019s what it comes down to with me. I\u2019ve got to locate my pitches better. Just missing, just trying to be too fine or whatever it is.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dillon Gee will take the mound for the Cardinals.\u00a0 Gee is 8-3 with a 3.76 ERA this season, and is starting his first career game against the Cardinals.\u00a0 He has lost both of his last starts, giving up nearly a run an inning on average.\u00a0 He gave up 8 runs in 11 innings in the last two home games.<\/p>\n

Gee has shown an ability to pitch up to 200 innings of work, evidenced by his 161 inning 13-8 record at Triple-A Buffalo.\u00a0 At only age 25, he strikes out a high percentage of batters, by utilizing excellent control over the ball.\u00a0 In his first 33 major league innings, however, he struckout a mere 17 of the hitters.\u00a0 He has been compared to Johnny Cueto and Marco Estrada, in terms of his upside.<\/p>\n

In his last two starts, he gave up 10 runs in 12 2\/3rds innings, while dropping both of his lat two home games.\u00a0 In his previous four decisions to that, he had a 1.77 ERA over 5 starts.<\/p>\n

The Cardinals have won 4 of the last 6 games while the total has gone over 3 times and under 3 times in the past 6 matchups, all of which were in 2010.<\/p>\n

The betting lines for this seem about right.\u00a0 The Mets are sending a better pitcher to the mound in Gee, who should be able to help keep the Cardinals’ run total low enough that the Mets won’t even have to do that well offensively.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Saint Louis Cardinals (50-45) AT New York Mets (47-48) July 19, 2011 at 7:10 PM EST Opening Line:\u00a0 NYM -125, STL +105 Current Line:\u00a0 NYM -120, STL +100 Opening Total:\u00a0 8 Current Total: 8 SP:\u00a0 STL- Kyle Lohse; NYM- Dillon Gee It’s always darkest before dawn, and the Mets are hoping that their offense will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40250,"featured_media":4977,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1444],"tags":[43,4834],"class_list":["post-16502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-headlines","tag-new-york-mets","tag-saint-louis-cardinals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.madduxsports.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.madduxsports.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.madduxsports.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.madduxsports.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40250"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.madduxsports.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16502"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.madduxsports.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16502\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16504,"href":"https:\/\/www.madduxsports.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16502\/revisions\/16504"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.madduxsports.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.madduxsports.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.madduxsports.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.madduxsports.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}