Lindy's MLB Picks Today: Best Bets For Thursday 7/9
Some MLB slates hand you a board full of mispriced home runs. Thursday, July 9, is the opposite. Eric Lindquist opened his Leans, Likes & Locks show by calling this the worst set of opening home run odds he has seen in twelve years of betting baseball, with almost every number on the board glowing red. That single read shaped the entire card. When the power market is dead, the value moves somewhere else, and today it moved to money lines and strikeout props. Below is his full Thursday card: the bets he officially fired, the leans he flagged but did not, and the reasoning behind each.
One vocabulary note first, because it changes how you tail this. A lean is a game he likes but has not bet, an official play is one he fired, and the sizing (half unit, quarter unit, dart) tells you the conviction. A lean is not a bet that was made.
In Summary
- The Home Run Board Is The Story: Lindy has essentially zero fired home run plays today because the opening prices are the most efficient he has seen in years. Do not force dingers on a day the market has them nailed.
- Three Money Lines are the backbone of the card: the Atlanta Braves, the Kansas City Royals and the Athletics, each a spot where his fair price sits inside the number the book is offering.
- The Conviction Play Is A Total: Mariners-Marlins under 8 runs, his largest stake at roughly half a unit, on a strong arm in a pitcher's park.
- One Strikeout Side: Nathan Eovaldi (TEX) over 7.5 strikeouts against a whiff-heavy Angels lineup.
- Where The Tool Agrees: the OddsShopper +EV screen is flagging its cleanest edges in the strikeout-under market this morning, not on home runs.
- Shop and price every one of these on the OddsShopper MLB odds screen before you fire.
Watch: Lindy's Leans, Likes & Locks (MLB)
Lindy ran all thirteen games in one Thursday breakdown, and the home run rant up top is worth hearing in full because it explains why the rest of the card looks the way it does. Watch it in his own words: Watch on YouTube.
Thursday's Fired Card At A Glance
| Play | Market | Stake |
|---|
| Atlanta Braves | Money Line | Standard |
| Kansas City Royals | Money Line | 0.25u |
| Athletics | Money Line | Standard |
| Mariners Vs. Marlins | Under 8 Runs | 0.5u |
| Nathan Eovaldi (TEX) | Over 7.5 Strikeouts | 0.25u |
| Kyle Schwarber (PHI) | No Hit | Small |
The sizing is the read. The half-unit Mariners-Marlins under is his conviction bet, the two money lines and the Eovaldi over sit a rung below, and the Schwarber and Royals plays are small, deliberate stakes rather than hammers. Money lines and plus-money props swing hard book to book, so pull each one up on the OddsShopper MLB odds screen and take the best available number before you fire.
Why There Are No Home Run Plays Today
Start here, because it is the reason this card exists. On a normal night Lindy is sifting fifteen or sixteen home run numbers looking for the two or three the books misprice. Thursday, he could not find one worth firing. The best positive-EV home run number on his sheet was a Kansas City bat, catcher Carter Jensen (KC), and even that sat as a long plus-money price against a left-hander he does not project to give up much lefty power. His read was blunt: if you are eyeing home run parlays today, or tailing someone with eight or nine dingers on their card, check yourself before you wreck yourself.
That is the whole thesis of the slate. When every power price is fair, the disciplined move is not to lower your standards and bet a bad number anyway. It is to go find the market that is still soft. For Lindy, that meant sides and strikeouts.
The Three Money Lines
The backbone of Thursday's card is three money lines, each the same shape of bet: a price the book is offering that his fair number says is too long.
Atlanta Braves. In Atlanta's game against Pittsburgh, Bryce Elder (ATL) and Mitch Keller (PIT) both grade out near the bottom of the board in raw stuff, so this is not a dominant-pitcher spot. It is a value one. Lindy makes the Braves a clearer favorite than the market does, with his fair price sitting inside the number the book has posted. That gap between his line and theirs is the definition of positive expected value, and it is what the show is built to find.
Kansas City Royals. This is the KC side of the Royals-Mets matchup, and the case is really a case against the opposing starter. Sean Manaea (NYM) profiles, in Lindy's read, as a reliever pressed into a starting role, which is exactly why the Royals are a live plus-money underdog here rather than a bigger dog. He is not sold on Kansas City's own starter Michael Wacha (KC) either, but with the Royals' better bats due to see Manaea early, the underdog price is longer than it should be. He sized it as a quarter unit, a real play at a modest stake.
Athletics. The A's draw a plus-money price in Detroit, and Lindy is betting on positive regression from a starter whose surface ERA overstates how badly he has actually pitched. The strikeout stuff is there; the walks are the swing factor. At a plus number, he only needs the arm to be roughly the pitcher the underlying skills say he is, not the one the ugly ERA advertises.
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The Under He Kept Coming Back To
The largest stake on the card is not a side, it is a total, and it is the number Lindy circled hardest all show: Mariners-Marlins under 8 runs, played for roughly a half unit. Everything about the spot points the same way. Bryce Miller (SEA) has been Seattle's best starter this season, and he is throwing in Miami's Marlins Park, one of the most run-suppressing environments in baseball. Lindy has been on the under in this series for days, and this is the day he leaned all the way in, going a touch more aggressive than the safer alternate numbers because the park and the pitcher are stacked in his favor.
Callback to the home run rant: this is the exact reason a dead power board does not kill a betting card. The same efficient market that priced out the home runs left a soft run total sitting in a bad-weather-for-offense ballpark, and that is a far cleaner edge than forcing a coin-flip dinger.
The Strikeout Market Is Where The Board Is Soft
If the power market is nailed, the strikeout market is where the mispricings hide today, and both Lindy and our tools landed there from opposite directions.
Lindy's fired strikeout play is an over: Nathan Eovaldi (TEX) over 7.5 strikeouts against the Angels, at a quarter unit. The logic is a clean matchup read. Eovaldi's stuff has trended up, and he draws an Angels lineup that, for all its danger with Mike Trout (LAA) in it, strikes out at a heavy clip. A right-handed arm missing bats against a lineup built to whiff, expected to work deep, is a soft strikeout number even after the book adjusted the opener. Reid Detmers (LAA) takes the ball on the other side, but this bet is about Eovaldi's punchouts, not the game.
Now flip to the under side, because that is where the OddsShopper +EV screen is flagging the board's cleanest edges this morning. Two of them sit on pitchers Lindy discussed:
| Play | Market | Fair | Best price | Edge |
|---|
| Andre Pallante (STL) | Under 3.5 Strikeouts | +120 | +128 (DraftKings) | +3.6% |
| Sean Manaea (NYM) | Under 4.5 Strikeouts | +128 | +134 (FanDuel) | +2.6% |
The one that stands out is Andre Pallante (STL), whose under 3.5 strikeouts is priced at +128 on DraftKings against a fair number of +120. Lindy is off the Cardinals-Brewers pitching entirely, noting he does not like Logan Henderson (MIL) or Pallante's stuff, and a low strikeout total on a contact-oriented arm lines up with exactly that read. The Sean Manaea (NYM) under, at +134 on FanDuel, rhymes with the Royals money line above: if Kansas City's bats get to him early and chase him, the strikeouts never pile up.
What A +128 Under Actually Pays: A Worked Example
A plus price is the whole point of these bets, so the math is worth one line. At +128, a winning bet pays $128 on every $100, and it only needs to cash about 44% of the time to profit (100 divided by 128 plus 100). The de-vigged fair price is +120, so DraftKings' +128 is handing you a better number than the true odds, and that gap is the edge. Grabbing the +128 instead of settling for +115 somewhere else is free value on the identical bet, which is the entire reason to shop.
The metric that actually matters is CLV. If you fire Pallante's under at +128 and the number closes at +115, you beat the market whether the bet cashes or not, and closing-line value is the north-star that predicts long-term profit. That is exactly what the OddsShopper Portfolio EV tool flags in real time: when a price shows a positive xROI against Pinnacle's number, it is a green light worth tailing, and it is doing across every book in seconds the same fair-price-versus-market math this section just walked through by hand.
The Schwarber No-Hit Angle
One more play worth explaining, because it is the cleverest bet on the card. In Philadelphia's game at Cincinnati, Lindy fired a small play on the no-hit side of Kyle Schwarber (PHI), betting he does not record a hit rather than that he does. The reasoning is behavioral: with a right-hander in Brady Singer (CIN) on the mound and runners on base, Lindy expects Schwarber to start drawing the Aaron Judge treatment, pitched around and walked in the spots where a manager would rather not let him beat them. A walk is not a hit, and at a fair price he is happy to buy a small piece of that.
The Leans He Did Not Fire
A few games got talked through without a bet. These are leans, not plays, and treating them as fired bets is how you end up with a card he never actually made.
- Drew Rasmussen (TB) Strikeouts: Lindy finds the Rays right-hander interesting against a Yankees lineup that has been getting mowed down, but the books were slow to post his line and he wanted to see the number before committing. A lean, not a bet.
- Logan Henderson (MIL) Under 4.5 Strikeouts: he leans the under on the Milwaukee starter against a St. Louis lineup that has been unusually tough to strike out, but he flagged that he did not pull the trigger. A lean.
- Cleveland's Left-Handed Power Vs. Bailey Ober (MIN): Bailey Ober (MIN) has bled left-handed power all year, so Cleveland's lefty bats are theoretically the play, but in a park that dampens that power and at the ugly prices on offer, Lindy passed rather than pay a bad number. The point of the day, again: no number is not a reason to bet.
Follow Lindy And Lock In The Tools
OddsShopper compares every sportsbook's number in one place and flags where the price is in your favor, the exact thing this card does by hand on three money lines, a run total and a strikeout board. On a slate where the edges are this specific, the tool doing it in seconds across 100-plus books is the difference between catching +134 and settling for +120. You can try it free for 7 days, and code BABYLINDY50 takes 50% off your first week or month of OddsShopper Pro: Start your free trial. Lindy posts his full card on Tails and breaks the slate down further on his daily OddsShopper research show.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Lindy's top MLB pick for Thursday 7/9?
His largest stake is the Mariners-Marlins under 8 runs, played for about a half unit behind Bryce Miller (SEA) in a run-suppressing Marlins Park. The backbone of the card is three money lines: the Atlanta Braves, the Kansas City Royals and the Athletics.
Why does Lindy have no home run plays today?
Because he called the opening home run odds the most efficient he has seen in twelve years, with nearly every number on the board fairly priced. When the power market is nailed, forcing a home run bet is how you lose value, so he moved to sides and strikeouts instead.
What strikeout props stand out on July 9?
Lindy fired Nathan Eovaldi (TEX) over 7.5 strikeouts against a whiff-heavy Angels lineup. On the under side, the OddsShopper +EV screen is flagging Andre Pallante (STL) under 3.5 at +128 and Sean Manaea (NYM) under 4.5 at +134 as the board's cleaner edges.
Where can I follow Lindy's full card?
Lindy posts his complete card on Tails and walks through the slate on his daily research show on the OddsShopper YouTube channel.
Bet responsibly. Odds and lineups move; confirm the current number and the confirmed lineup before you bet. 21+ where legal.
