Bodog: Red Sox & Yankees Betting Tips

The Fall (for now) of the Yankees and Red Sox

Yankees and Red Sox. Red Sox and Yankees. If you’re one of the many baseball fans out there who could do quite nicely without having these two teams marketed down your throats year after year, now could be your chance for some payback. Literally.

At the end of Monday’s action, Boston and New York were tied at 7-6 in the American League East standings, 2.5 games behind the smoking-hot Toronto Blue Jays at 10-4. That’s clearly not what the betting public was expecting. The Red Sox are 1.38 units in the red; the Yankees are even deeper in debt at minus-2.02 units. Those who have been following the MLB scoring trends and pounding the over in the early going have gone a combined 18-7-1 on these two marquee clubs.

The situation in New York has unraveled quite dramatically in the space of two weeks. The Yankees started the season with 3B Alex Rodriguez on the DL with torn cartilage and a cyst on his hip. The three-time MVP isn’t expected back until next month; in his place, Cody Ransom is hitting 6-for-40 with a .465 OPS. Meanwhile, Xavier Nady (.739 OPS) was reportedly expecting word on Monday whether or not he’d miss the season after tearing his elbow in Game No. 7 against Tampa Bay. Nick Swisher (1.238 OPS) gets a regular starting job now, but Yankees fans will be less enthusiastic to see Melky Cabrera (.642 OPS last year) move up a spot in the outfield depth chart.

New York’s meltdown on the mound is far more troubling. Chien-Ming Wang has fallen into a black hole at 0-3 with a 34.50 ERA and a 4.83 WHIP. Reaching into the seamhead toolkit and pulling out some advanced metrics isn’t going to enhance Wang’s profile. But Joe Sheehan at Baseball Prospectus is one of many pointing out that three starts is a small sample size. And the new Yankee Stadium is looking very much like a hitter’s park so far – possibly with a “wind-tunnel” effect to right field, where 14 out of an MLB-record 20 home runs sailed over the fence during the stadium’s first four games, all against Cleveland. Wang was responsible for one of those dingers in Saturday’s humiliating 22-4 loss. Joba Chamberlain (0-0, 5.06 ERA, 1.50 WHIP) allowed another as the back end of the Yankees rotation continues to drag.

This is music to the ears of the Red Sox Nation. But they’re not dancing right now, not with SS Jed Lowrie (.730 OPS as a rookie last year) scheduled for surgery on his broken wrist on Tuesday to join the list of Boston’s walking wounded.

Here’s a partial rundown:

Daisuke Matsuzaka (shoulder): Out indefinitely
John Smoltz (shoulder): April/May
Mark Kotsay (back): May
Julio Lugo (knee): Late April
Rocco Baldelli (hamstring): Day-to-day

Throw in the Josh Beckett suspension, which ends Apr. 25, and you have a watered-down version of the two-time World Series champions. But those glum faces around Beantown might have more to do with David Ortiz. The beloved Big Papi has limped out to a 10-for-51 start with a .558 OPS; at age 33 and coming off a gimpy 2008 campaign, this could be curtains for Ortiz. He couldn’t even get around the alleged fastball of Baltimore’s crafty Japanese import Koji Uehara on Sunday, whiffing twice in an 0-for-4 performance.

Now some good news for Boston supporters: The Sox won that matchup 2-1 and swept the four-game series with the Orioles to move back above .500 in the standings. As always, beware the small sample size. That’s the prevailing wisdom on the futures market, where the Yankees and Red Sox are co-favorites to win the AL pennant at 3-1. The current leaders from Toronto are 25-1.

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