A battle of NL Central opponents is featured to close out the week of MLB action.<\/p>\n
Milwaukee Brewers at St. Louis Cardinals<\/strong><\/p>\n Milwaukee is playing the sixth game of its current seven-game road trip to Florida (1-3) and St. Louis (0-2).\u00a0 The Brewers placed themselves in an early hole by allowing four runs in the first inning in a 5-4 loss to the Cardinals, as the team has allowed 49 runs in the first frame this season – the most of any inning.\u00a0 \u201cThere\u2019s been a bunch of games when we\u2019ve been behind,\u201d Brewers manager Ken Macha said.\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019ve got no answers for that.\u201d\u00a0 The team is getting use to the idea of scheduling left-handed starters in 2010, with Sunday\u2019s matchup representing the 30th game they\u2019ve scheduled a southpaw against the opposition.\u00a0 This represents a challenge against a Cardinals\u2019 club that is 9-6 versus lefties this season (+80), but the total is 5-9-1 O\/U in those games.<\/p>\n Brewers SP Manny Parra will be making his 20th appearance and third start of the season, going 1-3 with a 4.03 ERA.\u00a0 The left-hander made his first 15 appearances of the season out of the bullpen and also pitched in relief two times in between his last two starts.\u00a0 Parra is 1-3 with a 3.75 ERA as a reliever and has allowed four earned runs in seven innings for a 5.14 ERA as a starter.\u00a0 He gets the start due to it regularly being Dave Bush\u2019s spot in the rotation, but the right-hander is a dismal 0-3 with a 10.57 ERA at Busch Stadium.\u00a0 Parra is 2-1 with a 2.97 ERA in 12 games, including 10 starts against the Cardinals (+30), with a 2-0 mark and 2.86 ERA in five starts at the Cardinals home ball park.<\/p>\n St. Louis has won 9 of its last 11 games at home and the Cardinals are fourth in the National League in home winning percentage by producing a 19-9 record (+230).\u00a0 The Cardinals are in position to pick up their first home sweep of Milwaukee since April 2003, as they\u2019ve won just five of their last 18 meetings against the Brewers at Busch Stadium.\u00a0 Cardinals OF Colby Rasmus has paced the offense recently, going 5-for-7 in the series with five RBIs.\u00a0 He may find his recent success difficult to duplicate on Sunday, as he\u2019s 0-for-7 with three strikeouts against Parra in his career.\u00a0 St. Louis is outscoring opponents by a run and a half this season at home (5.0-3.5).<\/p>\n Cardinals SP Jaime Garcia is ready to make his second career start against the Brewers on national television, picking up a 7-1 road victory in his only previous outing against them.\u00a0 The left-hander allowed just a four hits and a single run over six innings of work in his season debut in that game on April 10.\u00a0 Garcia lowered his ERA to 1.32 with Monday\u2019s win over the Reds, marking the lowest earned-run-average bye a NL rookie through his first 10 starts of a season since the Dodgers\u2019 Fernando Valenzuela had a 1.24 ERA in 1981 at that point.\u00a0 He is a perfect 2-0 with a 0.72 ERA in four home starts this season, but the Cards are just an even 2-2 in those games (-70).<\/p>\n The lines maker has placed the Cardinals as a -200+ favorite in this contest due to all the publicity that Garcia is receiving.\u00a0 It\u2019s important to note that St. Louis is 14-4 as a home favorite of -200 to -225 (+540), but almost all of those victories have come with either Chris Carpenter of Adam Wainwright on the hill.\u00a0 Dog bettors don\u2019t have much past experience to work with considering the Brewers are 2-3 (+60) as\u00a0 a road underdog of +175 to +200…..but then again that may be enough reason to take the leap.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A battle of NL Central opponents is featured to close out the week of MLB action. Milwaukee Brewers at St. Louis Cardinals Milwaukee is playing the sixth game of its current seven-game road trip to Florida (1-3) and St. Louis (0-2).\u00a0 The Brewers placed themselves in an early hole by allowing four runs in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":181,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1444],"tags":[1757,1755,1492,1754,1756,1753,266,841],"class_list":["post-3870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-headlines","tag-busch-stadium","tag-colby-rasmus","tag-espn","tag-jaime-garcia","tag-ken-macha","tag-manny-parra","tag-milwaukee-brewers","tag-st-louis-cardinals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.madduxsports.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3870","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\/181"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.madduxsports.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3870"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.madduxsports.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3872,"href":"https:\/\/www.madduxsports.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3870\/revisions\/3872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.madduxsports.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.madduxsports.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.madduxsports.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}