Wednesday MLB Best Bets: Jacob Misiorowski Strikeout Prop Leads Card

I love Wednesday’s as we get a full day of baseball action. I’m going to the Mets game tonight, so, I will stay away from reverse jinxing them though I’m optimistic that Christian Scott will do well.

I do have a couple MLB Picks I like better, anyway.

Season Record 21-16-1, +2.63 Units

Padres at Brewers

How high is too high on a Misiorowski K prop?

He tops all qualified pitchers with a 39.5% K%. In fact only two relievers with at least 10 IP have a higher rate (Mason Miller, of course, and also Eric Sabrowski on the Guardians).

The Mis also tops all SP’s who’ve gone at least 10 IP with a 39.2% Whiff%. And he seems to be getting better as he threw a 103.6 MPH pitch in his last outing, the fastest for an SP since Statcast started tracking in 2008. He threw 9 more pitches 103 or higher. Oh, and he struck out 11 Yankees.

All told he has 70 K’s in eight starts, with nine or more in five of those outings and eight in a sixth. I’m not sure the opponent matters enormously vs. this type of gas. Either he’s on or he’s not. But fwiw, the Padres are a slightly easier team than average to whiff as they have 22.7% K% against righties, 12th highest in MLB.

Rays at Blue Jays

Year in, year out, I don’t know how the Rays do it. They constantly sell in the offseason and then show up with the most blah of lineups. And yet they’re almost always at least competitive in a tough division. They’re more than competitive right now of course as they sit atop the entire AL. One look at their lineup and there’s three potent bats in Jonathan Aranda, Yandy Diaz and Junior Caminero, a speedster that gets on base reasonably well in Chandler Simpson, and then a pack of replacement level meh. But they do a couple things well as they lead MLB in Contact% and are second (to Toronto) in K%.

And that makes this an interesting matchup as they face Dylan Cease tonight, an SP who does not yield much contact. He’s been generally excellent in his first year north of the border, with a 2.58 ERA and 34.6% K%. His career long bugaboo is the walk as he has a 9.4% BB% and 35.3% Ball%.

The Rays will start Griffin Jax tonight, and he’s just getting stretched out so figure him for 5 IP tops, at which point they’ll turn it over to their bullpen which is usually very good. Not so much last night though. I don’t love going against Cease, but I think the Rays’ contact skills mitigate his big strength and we got nice plus odds to give it a shot.