It’s been a difficult start to the year for both the St. Louis Cardinals and New York Yankees, two teams set to meet up in a three-game interleague showdown over the weekend. Currently, St. Louis holds the worst run differential in baseball while New York will be playing without either their starting catcher or their starting shortstop.
This series will be contested from Friday, April 14, 2017 through Sunday, April 16, 2017 at Yankee Stadium in New York. The games on Friday and Saturday are being shown live on MLB Network while Sunday’s showdown will be on ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball.
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Pitching Matchups
The starting rotation is the biggest weakness for this rebuilding Yankees squad, but they’ve got the top of their rotation in line for this Cardinals series giving them at least some level of certainty.
For the Yankees, the top of the rotation means we’ll see Masahiro Tanaka for his third start and then the aging veteran in C.C. Sabathia and then their hurler with all of the talent and none of the consistency in Michael Pineda.
St. Louis will also be sending an ace, an aging veteran and a talented, but inconsistent pitcher to the hill in this series, but just in a slightly different order. They’re leading off with their inconsistent arm in Michael Wacha who like Pineda is coming off an outstanding start.
After that, we’ll see Carlos Martinez take the mound on Saturday followed by Adam Wainwright on Sunday, the aging starter.
For the Friday night game, Tanaka needs to pitch like he has since coming over from Japan. His first two starts of the season have been and adventure and not in a good way. He allowed a career high seven earned runs against the Rays in his first start, unable to get through three innings. He pitched five in his second start, but walked four Orioles bats while hitting two more. Walking four in Baltimore is not easy to do, the O’s are aggressive swingers.
Wacha, meanwhile, as noted pitched well in his only start of the season. He went six strong innings, allowing just one run against a Reds team that’ve been swinging the bats well early on. Wacha broke onto the scene in 2013 and had a 17-7 season with a 3.38 ERA as recently as 2015 before seeing his ERA balloon over five and his shoulder have issues last year.
Wacha’s success has always been dependent on his health and his change of speeds. His changeup was working on Saturday.
Speaking of Saturday, the Sabathia versus Martinez matchup should favor the youngster, but the Yankees have managed to win both of Sabathia’s starts this year after he’s given up three runs in 11 innings.
Martinez, however, has the better stuff at this stage, but he had one great outing against the Cubs on Opening Night and then struggled against Cincinnati on Sunday. Nevertheless, Martinez has a career .640 winning percentage and 3.22 ERA as a starter.
For Sunday, Wainwright hasn’t been the same pitcher since the injury that cost him nearly all of 2015. He had a 4.62 ERA last year and is 0-2 so far in 2017. He’s been missing his spots and been incredibly hittable early. His stuff just isn’t the same and while nobody and grit it out like Waino, at 35-years old, he’s a shell of his former self.
Fortunately for Wainwright, he’s matching up against Pineda who has already made one of his three good starts for the season after absolutely dominating the Rays, carrying a perfect game into the seventh. We’ve seen flashes of brilliance from Pineda before and he’s gone right back to struggling. The fact he has one start of 3.2 innings, four runs and eight hits and one of near perfection shows just how much of an unknown he is from game-to-game.
Betting Trends
It’s been a really tough start for the Cardinals. Their offense has been the biggest problem. They’ve already been shut out twice and have scored one or fewer runs three times. The hope was a 10 run outburst on Saturday would spark things for this team, but they’ve averaged three runs per game in the three games since.
The Cardinals lineup looks to be rather balanced and should be better, but you do have an aging Jhonny Peralta holding down the fort at third base while two players that found themselves optioned to Triple-A last year hold prominent positions in Kolten Wong and Randal Grichuk.
Grichuk has a couple homers, but also 11 strike outs. Aledmys Diaz and Jedd Gyorko are the only other two players with homers and Diaz is the only one with much offensive success overall.
With the inconsistencies of this lineup so far, as long as the New York pitchers don’t let Diaz beat them they should find success unless someone else can break out.
Injury Report
The Yankees’ are in the midst of a rebuilding process. Unlike some teams that have completely torn it down to rebuild, New York remains at least a competitive team, but some of that competitiveness has taken a hit with injuries.
For instance, last year, the team’s best player from Game 1 to Game 162 was Didi Gregorius, but an injury in the World Baseball Classic has him on the shelf. At the same time, the superstar that took the world by storm after his midseason call up is also sidelined as Gary Sanchez will now miss at least a month.
Despite the eight RBIs by Ronald Torreyes, he’s not the same player Gregorious is. Likewise, Austin Romine cannot put up nearly the same numbers as Sanchez. Instead, the team will need other youngsters to step up. Aaron Judge’s bat has started to heat up a bit and he can offer some pop, but Greg Bird has been dealing with nagging injuries and illnesses of his own and is just 1-for-16 to start the year after a red hot Spring Training.
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