Baseball betting begins in earnest on Monday as teams start the regular season.
Other than Boston and New York, who started last night, most of the other teams begin today. The Cardinals and Reds play a day game in MLB betting that will be televised on ESPN.
Baseball betting favors St. Louis in this game even though they are on the road. The Cardinals are going with Chris Carpenter while the Reds counter with Aaron Harang. Last season Carpenter finished as the runner-up for the Cy Young and probably should have won the award. He is one of the best pitchers in baseball. This is his fifth career Opening Day start, and his fourth with St. Louis.
This will be the fifth straight Opening Day start for Aaron Harang. He did not pitch that well last season and there was some question as to whether he would get the nod to start the season or if it would be Bronson Arroyo. Harang is 1-3 with a 3.52 ERA on Opening Day. Harang had a lot of bad luck last year and very little run support so it will be interesting to see if he gets some good luck in his starts this season.
St. Louis has beaten Cincinnati in 12 of the last 20 meetings. The Reds did take two of three last year in the last series at Cincinnati. The one loss though was a 13-0 shutout as Carpenter beat them. The teams split their other six games at Cincinnati last season. 12 of the last 20 games in the series have gone over in baseball betting. That is a bit of a surprise considering both teams were in the Top 10 last season in ERA.
The Cardinals were solid on the road last year as they went 45-36 in MLB betting. St. Louis had the fourth best ERA in the league a year ago and on offense they have the one-two punch of Albert Pujols and Matt Holliday.
Cincinnati was just 40-41 in home games a year ago. The Reds were not bad in pitching as they were 9th in the league but their offense struggled. Cincinnati scored just over four runs per game which ranked 24th in the league. Cincinnati was basically a .500 team for the most part last season and that is where a lot of experts think they will finish this year.