Live With Lindy MLB Picks & Research Recap (7/21)
This Live With Lindy MLB picks recap comes from a Tuesday board that fell apart before the first pitch, and that wreckage shaped every read in Eric Lindquist's afternoon research show. The Yankees' game and the Orioles–Red Sox game were both washing out, more of the slate was in weather jeopardy, and the whole Northeast was sitting under real rain risk. When a third of the slate is unplayable, the value doesn't disappear, it concentrates. It piles into the clean parks and the arms the market hasn't caught up to yet. That is exactly where Lindy (Eric Lindquist) spent three-plus hours of live baseball on the "Live With Lindy" MLB Research + Data Deep Dive, and the through-line was simple: fade the noise, buy the mispriced.
One vocabulary note first, because it decides how you tail any of this. A lean is a game he likes but has not bet. An official play is one he actually fired. Do not promote a lean to a bet that never got made.
Hunter Goodman — one of the featured players on today's slate.
In Summary
- The Headliner: Hunter Goodman (COL) at Coors Field, played as an 8.5 fantasy-score pick'em, is the shortest home-run projection Lindy says he has posted since Aaron Judge went down. He also fired CJ Abrams (WSH) at the same 8.5 number in the same game.
- The Pick'em Edge Nobody Is Pricing: an over on Kumar Rocker (TEX) pitching outs against the White Sox, backed by a month of underlying numbers the market is ignoring.
- The Other Fired Arm: Drew Rasmussen (TB), the play he led off the whole card with in Toronto.
- Also Fired: Bo Bichette (TOR) to go deep in Toronto, plus an Otto Lopez (MIA) pick'em outlier on Underdog in Houston.
- Live Board Value (OddsShopper's Own De-Vigged Numbers, Not Lindy's Plays): five +EV unders on the same slate, topped by José Altuve (HOU) Under 0.5 hits at +190. Table below.
- Leans He Did Not Fire: Chase Burns (CIN) strikeouts, a Framber Valdez (DET) outs over he kept off the card, a Miami Marlins moneyline, and a Logan O'Hoppe (LAA) homer.
Watch The Video
Lindy built this whole card live with the odds screen open, upgrading numbers as the board moved. Watch it in his own words: Watch on YouTube.
Coors Is The Whole Board: Hunter Goodman Headlines
Every hitting environment on Tuesday's slate is playing second fiddle to Coors Field, and the bat Lindy kept coming back to there is Hunter Goodman (COL). This is not a soft "he's due" call. Goodman strikes out around 30% of the time against right-handed pitching, so he needs a matchup that cannot punish that swing-and-miss, and this one cannot. He opens against Carson Palmquist (WSH), a reliever-turned-opener with a tiny sample and no changeup to spin him off the fastball, then rolls into Miles Michaelis and a Nationals bullpen sitting near the bottom three in baseball. Take away the strikeout and you take away the only thing that stops Goodman, and nobody in this Washington staff has the strikeout stuff to do it.
That is why Lindy fired him as an 8.5 fantasy-score pick'em on Underdog rather than only chasing the straight home run. The fantasy-score version pays for a double, a walk or a hit-by-pitch on top of the homer, so Goodman clears the number a dozen different ways in the best ballpark on the card. That makes it the shortest home-run projection he says he has attached to a hitter since Aaron Judge went on the shelf, and I keep landing on the same read: at Coors, against no strikeout stuff, this is the one bat you build around.
He paired it with CJ Abrams (WSH) at the same 8.5 fantasy-score number in the same game. Abrams carried a home run price short enough that Lindy thought hard about it straight, but the fantasy-score line is the better buy: he only needs an extra-base hit plus a run, or an extra-base hit plus a walk, to cover. Get both Coors bats over their number and the game environment does the rest.
The Pick'em Outs Plays: Kumar Rocker And Drew Rasmussen
From the best hitting park to the two arms Lindy actually put pick'em money on. One of them is being priced like a back-end starter while pitching like a mid-rotation arm, and the outs market hasn't caught up.
The first is Kumar Rocker (TEX), an over on his pitching outs against the White Sox. Chicago has real prospect talent now (Braden Montgomery (CWS) among them), but Colson Montgomery got dinged up and may sit, softening the lineup underneath. Rocker's outs were hanging at a friendlier number than the rest of the market when Lindy grabbed them, exactly the kind of small structural edge that stacks up over a season.
The second is Drew Rasmussen (TB), who kicked off Lindy's whole program in Toronto. Lindy has been on this one since early in the day and already banked a little closing-line value firing it. His read is straightforward: Rasmussen sits on the right side of both his outs and his strikeouts, and the strikeout number was still hanging at a live price deep into the afternoon, which is exactly when he likes to pounce.
The Arm Nobody's Talking About
Rocker's season line will not sell you on anything: a 4.33 SIERA, a 1.37 WHIP, a 20.5% strikeout rate. Look only at that and you move on. The last month is a different pitcher, and that gap is the whole edge.
| Kumar Rocker (TEX) | Season baseline | Last month |
|---|---|---|
| ERA Estimators | 4.33 SIERA (season) | 3.14 ERA, 3.30 xFIP |
| Swinging-Strike Rate | league-ish | 15.4% |
| Hard-Hit Rate | mid-pack | sub-40% |
| Slider Usage | secondary | primary, ~50% whiffs on it |
The number that jumps off that table is the 15.4% swinging-strike rate "out of nowhere," and it is not random. Rocker has leaned almost all the way into a slider that is missing bats at a 50% clip, cut the sinker, and started limiting both walks and hard contact. His velocity is actually down a touch, sitting around 94, which is why nothing in a surface scouting report screams "buy." The results just quietly got good, and a 3.14 ERA with a 3.30 xFIP over a month says he earned it. Lindy could not get his strikeouts number at a live price on pick'em, so he took the outs instead and flagged Rocker as a DFS target too. This is the arm on the board I keep coming back to: when the underlying jumps like this and the market hasn't repriced, the outs line is where I want to be.
Kohl Drake And Why A Shiny Triple-A ERA Is A Mirage
The Rocker read works because you trust the process under the results. Flip that logic and you get Kohl Drake (ARI), the reason Lindy leaned the over in the Diamondbacks' game. Drake arrived from Triple-A Reno with a sub-3 ERA, and in the Pacific Coast League that number is close to meaningless. Reno is a launching pad; arms get bludgeoned there and still post fine lines, or post fine lines and hide real problems. Drake's are real. The fastball is legit, and Lindy is the first to say so, grading it a 60 and pushing back on the scouting reports that claim it does not pop. The problem is everything under it: a 5.74 xFIP, a walk rate he flagged as a genuine concern, and a career-high fly-ball lean, none of which the shiny surface ERA reflects.
Chase Field takes a little off the top: a 103 park factor on a three-year rolling average, playing up for hits but not for home runs, so the damage is more likely to come as extra-base contact than as a barrage over the wall. On the other side, Jack Perkins (ATH) brings a 27.5% strikeout rate against righties that gives Arizona's righty bats a live path, even with Tim Tawa (ARI) and his 90-plus mph average exit velocity against lefties in the mix, and Corbin Carroll (ARI) a triples threat in Chase Field, which Lindy pegs as the number-two triples park in baseball, sitting just a hair behind Coors at number one. A hittable rookie in a hitter-friendly park, on the wrong side of his own numbers, is a total worth leaning up.
Bo Bichette And The Blue Jays Bat He Fired
Back to a straight bet he actually made. Lindy fired Bo Bichette (TOR) to hit a home run in Toronto, a price he flagged as a bit of an outlier on the board, which is exactly the kind of pricing gap he hunts. He rates Bichette a strong enough bat that he preferred him over Francisco Alvarez (NYM) among his home-run pick'em options, and folded the Bichette homer into the rest of his Blue Jays exposure.
He fired one more bat too: Otto Lopez (MIA) in Houston against Tatsuya Imai (HOU), a pricing outlier he grabbed as the best available pick'em square on Underdog and flatly called nuclear at his number. That gives him a second angle on the same Marlins game he was eyeing for a moneyline lean.
A Worked Example: Why The 8.5 Fantasy Score Is SO Hard To Miss
The Goodman and Abrams plays both live at the same 8.5 fantasy score on Underdog, and Lindy's actual math on why that number clears is worth walking through. In his read, Underdog's scoring format rewards exactly the events these two profiles produce more generously than the DraftKings or PrizePicks equivalents: three points for a walk, three for a hit-by-pitch, six for a double, all on top of the hit and the run. Stack those and 8.5 stops being a home-run-or-bust number.
Run the cover paths. A hitter clears it with an extra-base hit plus a run, or an extra-base hit plus a walk, or an extra-base hit plus another hit. There are, as Lindy put it, "so many covers inside of two and a half" points of production. Now drop that into a Coors game where Goodman is squaring up no strikeout stuff and Abrams brings speed and extra-base pop from the other side. If each just clears a couple of points, and in this environment that is the base case, it becomes very hard to picture them both missing the 8.5. Before I take either, I still pull the live number up on the OddsShopper props board to confirm the fantasy-score line has not crept off 8.5, because a half-point move on that total shifts the math more than any bump in juice would.
The Leans He Didn't Fire
Not everything cleared the bar to become a bet, and the honest reads are the ones worth writing down:
- Chase Burns (CIN) Strikeouts: Burns went over 100 pitches last time out and gets a 13-day layoff, and Lindy called 8-plus strikeouts his single favorite look on the board (with seven the more likely outcome), then talked himself out of firing it. It stays a lean, not a play.
- Framber Valdez (DET) Over 17.5 Outs at Wrigley: he kept it off the card on purpose. He likes the arm and the pitching weather is good, but he wanted the number to sit for now rather than force it.
- Miami Marlins Moneyline at Houston, where Tatsuya Imai (HOU) has started leaking left-handed power and Tyler Phillips (MIA) gives the Marlins a live opener. A lean, the game he kept circling without pulling the trigger.
- Logan O'Hoppe (LAA) Home Run at a fat plus-money price against Matthew Liberatore (STL), whose fly-ball and pull-air rates are career highs. A price he liked, not one he upgraded.
There was no manufactured "fade" list here, because there was no owned chalk worth fading. When the honest answer is "nothing cleared," you leave it out.
OddsShopper's +EV Screen: Five More Unders On The Same Board
Lindy's card is the show, but the OddsShopper +EV screen was live underneath it the whole time, and one of its edges lands right inside his Rocker game. These are the screen's de-vigged unders, captured live off the board, not Lindy's plays:
| Player | Market | Best Price | Fair (win %) |
|---|---|---|---|
| José Altuve (HOU) | Under 0.5 Hits | +190 (Bet365) | 38.6% |
| Braden Montgomery (CWS) | Under 0.5 Hits | +185 (Bet365) | 38.8% |
| Austin Martin (MIN) | Under 0.5 Hits | +155 (BetMGM) | 42.0% |
| Xander Bogaerts (SD) | Under 0.5 Hits | +155 (Fanatics) | 41.8% |
| Luis Lara (MIL) | Under 0.5 Hits | +150 (Bet365) | 43.7% |
The Braden Montgomery under is the fun one, because it rhymes with Lindy's Rocker outs play from earlier: if Rocker is pitching better than his line, the White Sox bats underneath him are exactly the ones the screen expects to go quiet. The Altuve number up top is the one I would sit with: it is the widest gap of the group, and at +190 against a de-vigged 38.6% fair, that is real +EV on a straightforward hits market. Price any of these on the OddsShopper odds screen, and if a bonus bet is burning a hole, run it through the free bet converter before you waste it on a chalk favorite.
Tuesday's Fired Plays At A Glance
| Play | Market | Format |
|---|---|---|
| Hunter Goodman (COL) | Over 8.5 Fantasy Score | Underdog pick'em |
| CJ Abrams (WSH) | Over 8.5 Fantasy Score | Underdog pick'em |
| Kumar Rocker (TEX) | Over Pitching Outs | Pick'em |
| Drew Rasmussen (TB) | Over Strikeouts / Outs | Pick'em |
| Bo Bichette (TOR) | To Hit A Home Run | Straight |
| Otto Lopez (MIA) | Pricing Outlier | Underdog pick'em |
The row that matters most is the Rocker line, because it is the one built on brand-new information rather than name value. Pull up the live number on the OddsShopper Strikeouts board or the Home Runs board before you touch any of these, because plus-money props move hard book to book, and pair your book of choice with its current sign-up offer, here's how to claim it.
FAQ
What is Live With Lindy? It is Eric Lindquist's live MLB show on the OddsShopper YouTube channel. This edition was the afternoon MLB Research + Data Deep Dive, where he works the entire board game by game, separating bets he fired from games he only likes.
Is the Hunter Goodman play a home run bet? He fired it as an 8.5 fantasy-score pick'em on Underdog, which pays for extra-base hits, walks and hit-by-pitches on top of a homer, not only the home run itself. He rates the straight home run the shortest number he has posted in a long time, but the fantasy-score version gives him more ways to cover in the best ballpark on the board.
Why is the Kumar Rocker over the sharpest read? Because his last month (a 3.14 ERA, a 3.30 xFIP and a 15.4% swinging-strike rate driven by a slider missing bats at a 50% clip) is a level above his season line, and the market has not repriced him yet.
Get These Numbers Before They Move
Tuesday proved the point of the whole show: when weather guts a third of the slate, you do not force the washed-out games, you concentrate on the clean parks and the arms the board hasn't caught. Coors gave Lindy his headliner in Goodman, and a quiet month gave him an edge on Rocker that the market is still sleeping on. Shop every one of these on the OddsShopper MLB odds screen before you fire, because the edge is in the number you get, not the pick alone.
Get 50% off your first week or month of OddsShopper Pro with code BABYLINDY50 → That is the same board Lindy uses to shop Bet365, BetMGM and Fanatics against each other in real time.
