It’s always nice to start your season against one of the worst teams in baseball and the Minnesota Twins took advantage of their good fortune sweeping the Royals, 3-0. Now, the undefeated Twins head from KC to Miami to face the Miami Marlins who are 1-3 after a four-gamer at home against the New York Mets.
For Game 1 of this three game series the Twins are sending Tyler Mahle to the mound and the Marlins will go with Johnny Cueto. Cueto is making his Marlins debut in his 16th season in the big leagues and coming off a really solid year with the White Sox. Mahle is back with the Twins after coming over from Cincinnati mid-year and making four starts.
Let’s get into the odds for this matchup between the Twins and Marlins in Miami tonight.
Twins vs. Marlins odds, spread and total
Twins vs. Marlins prediction and pick
In those four starts that Mahle made with Minnesota he had a 4.41 ERA, but a 5.56 FIP which means there would have likely been some regression had there been a bigger sample size. He wasn’t pitching as well as it seemed to end his season.
However, Johnny Cueto wasn’t quite pitching as great as his 3.35 ERA in 158.1 innings looks. He was not missing bats at all. He was bottom three percent of the league in whiff rate, and bottom eight percent in strikeout percentage. He just wasn’t walking people and wasn’t getting hit hard. Minimizing damage is certainly a skill and he was pitching well to contact, but his expected ERA was 4.02. I think he’ll regress this season and have a much worse ERA because of it.
I also don’t think the offense of Miami looks reliable early on this year. Outside of Luis Arraez of course. The former Twin has nine hits through four games, but they’ve only scored eight runs, and the rest of the offense has been pretty quiet. I’ll take the Twins to remain unbeaten. They've haven't had an explosive offense, but their new arrival, Joey Gallo has two home runs and the run production has been better than the Marlins.
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Game odds refresh periodically and are subject to change