Live With Lindy MLB Picks Today: Research & Best Bets For Thursday 7/23
Five games is a thin Thursday, and a thin board changes how you have to hunt. There are no stars to lean on and no full slate to spread across, so the edge has to come from two places the market is slow to price: the environment a game is played in, and a pitching mismatch big enough that one lineup goes quiet on its own. That is exactly the board OddsShopper's Eric Lindquist (Lindy) spent 90 minutes carving up on his MLB research deep-dive, and it's why the majority of his volume landed on one game.
Before the plays, one word of vocabulary, because it decides how you read everything below: a lean is a number Lindy likes but hasn't fired, an official play is money down, and the stake (a tenth of a unit, a quarter, a half) tells you how much conviction is behind it. Nothing here gets promoted from a lean to a play unless he actually bet it, and the loudest edge on the board, as you'll see, is one he never mentioned by name.
Ben Williamson, one of the featured players on today's slate.
In Summary
- The Game He Built The Show Around: Tampa Bay Rays At Toronto Blue Jays. The roof is open at Rogers Centre with the wind out, and Lindy's core read is that the market is under-pricing that home-run environment against two soft pitching plans.
- Tampa Bay Home-Run Darts (Small Stakes, Plus Money): Ben Williamson (TB), Victor Mesa Jr. (TB) and Richie Palacios (TB), a tenth to a quarter of a unit each on longshot HR prices, plus both team totals laddered to the OVER.
- A Prove-It Fade Of The Toronto Starter: Shane Bieber (TOR) Under 16.5 pitching outs, on short rest with elite results sitting on top of poor underlying stuff, with a live Rays lineup up next in an open-air park.
- The Mismatch Play: The Detroit Tigers Run Line over Kansas City, with Troy Melton (DET) opposite Randy Dobnak (KC) and the Royals missing their two best bats.
- Where The Verified Board Value Lives (OddsShopper's Own De-Vigged Numbers, Not Lindy's Stated Plays): three Royals bats to go hitless vs Melton, led by Carter Jensen (KC) Under 0.5 hits at +150 (Bet365), the biggest of them at a 2.5% edge.
Watch The Video
Lindy walked through the full research process (park factors, stuff-plus, his projection blend for pick'em boards) in real time. Watch the whole breakdown in his own words: Watch on YouTube.
Rays–Blue Jays: The Roof Is Open, And The Market Is Asleep
Here's the promise this whole article pays off: on a five-game night, the single biggest lever isn't a bat or an arm; it's the building. Rogers Centre with the roof open is a meaningfully better home-run park than the closed dome most models default to, and today the wind is out with humidity and barometric pressure nudging in the hitters' favor. Lindy's whole thesis is that market makers see the same weather feed he does and simply disagree about what it means. He'll take that disagreement.
The pitching plans do the rest of the work. Tampa Bay opens with Casey Legumina and piggybacks lefty Ian Seymour, a change-up-heavy arm who, despite a strong strikeout rate, has posted lefty-power issues year over year (a 152 expected ISO against left-handed bats is not a typo). Toronto counters with Shane Bieber (TOR) on four days' rest. That short-rest wrinkle matters: a rotation crunch that has pulled arms up from Triple-A, plus a desire to stay cautious with Kevin Gausman's remaining starts before a likely trade, has left the Blue Jays stretched thin enough to roll Bieber back early, and his last start (six innings, a huge strikeout total against the White Sox) came with the roof closed and elite results sitting on top of stuff-plus and fastball numbers that don't support them. Faced with a repeat, Lindy trusts the process over the box score: that line doesn't sustain against this Rays lineup in an open-air park.
That's the reasoning behind Bieber Under 16.5 pitching outs, a prove-it fade rather than a hero bet, and behind a scatter of small home-run darts on the Tampa Bay side. Ben Williamson (TB), bumped up to seventh in the order today, drew a tenth-unit look at a longshot plus price. Victor Mesa Jr. (TB) took a quarter-unit swing and Richie Palacios (TB) another tenth-unit dart, both at long plus prices. He passed on Junior Caminero (TB) only because the number was too short to be value, a reminder that the shortest price is never the play. To back the theme without living or dying on one swing, he laddered both team totals to the OVER, a smidge more on Toronto's five-run number and a quarter on Tampa Bay's alt six, betting that one of these lineups posts a crooked number even if you can't say which.
Tigers–Royals: The Mismatch That Prices Itself
If the Rays–Jays game is about environment, this one is about a gap so wide the market took a while to catch up. Detroit hands the ball to Troy Melton (DET); Kansas City counters with Randy Dobnak (KC), a soft-tossing arm (a 65-grade fastball, surviving on location) that Lindy flatly expects to get hit hard. Then the Royals turned in a lineup with no Bobby Witt Jr. and no Jack Caglianone, their two best hitters by every metric, both out. A rising arm against a depleted, contact-light lineup is why Lindy fired the Detroit Tigers run line, calling it one of the better numbers he grabbed all day.
The prop board is where that same read gets specific, and where OddsShopper's de-vigged pricing shows the value, not the longest odds. Every price below is a Royals bat to finish without a hit against Melton:
| Royals Bat (Vs Troy Melton) | The read | Fair | Best takeable | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Carter Jensen Under 0.5 Hits | Rookie catcher leading off a Witt-less lineup | +144 | +150 (Bet365) | +2.5% |
| Michael Massey Under 0.5 Hits | Bottom-order bat with no thump vs a rising arm | +135 | +140 (Bet365) | +2.1% |
| Isaac Collins Under 0.5 Hits | Platoon bat, no power to punish a mistake | +121 | +125 (BetMGM) | +1.8% |
The one I keep coming back to is Carter Jensen (KC) at +150 on Bet365. Fair value on that no-hit outcome is +144, which is another way of saying his true chance of going hitless prices out around 41%. Anything longer than +144 pays you more than that break-even, so +150 is a real, if small, edge, and it's the cleanest expression of the exact thing Lindy is betting when he takes the Tigers run line: this Royals lineup, missing its stars, does not do damage tonight. That's positive expected value in one line: the implied probability of the price is lower than the real thing.
Diamondbacks–Cardinals: One Bat He'll Chase
The third game he touched barely needed a paragraph, and that's the point: good process means knowing when one name is the whole bet. Arizona faces Michael McGreevy in St. Louis, and Lindy kept circling Corbin Carroll (ARI), whose home-run number opened at a price he couldn't explain and drifted his way all day. That drift is the tell the OddsShopper line-movement history is built to catch: when a number keeps sliding toward you, the market is agreeing with your read in real time. So he set a line up front, stayed a fan at the opener, would still play it a hair short of the next public book, and passed the moment it moved past that. No hedging, no five-stat justification, just a disciplined number on a bat the market hadn't finished correcting.
How To Bet These The Way Lindy Does
This was a research show, not a tout sheet, so the transferable part is the method, and tonight's board demonstrated it three ways. First, shop relentlessly: Carroll's home-run number opened at a price Lindy couldn't explain and drifted toward the next public book as the day went on, and Bieber's outs total moved book to book too, which is why Lindy leans on Bet365 to snipe those stale plus prices before they correct. New to one of the books pricing tonight's board? Start with BetMGM's current sportsbook offer and how to claim it. Second, respect the environment the model won't: the open roof at Rogers Centre is the entire Rays vs Jays thesis, and it is the reason those Tampa Bay home-run darts have any price at all. Third, let de-vigged pricing tell you the edge, not your gut: the OddsShopper MLB home-run and hits boards surface fair value against every major sportsbook, so you are comparing a real number to a takeable one exactly the way the Carter Jensen row above shakes out at +150 over a +144 fair mark. And if you are sitting on a promo, a free bet converter hedges that free bet across two sportsbooks to bank most of its value as cash rather than riding a coin-flip longshot, the same "bet at the best price you can get" discipline Lindy hammered all show.
Want the odds screen Lindy runs the show on? The same live de-vigged board, +EV screen and prop tools he used to find these edges are inside OddsShopper Pro. Code BABYLINDY50 gets you 50% off your first week or month. Start here.
The Bottom Line
Five games, one real conclusion: on a thin slate, the money isn't in guessing which star gets hot; it's in the two spots where the market and the reality have drifted apart. Tonight that's an open roof in Toronto the models are still pricing as a dome, and a Royals lineup that showed up without its best two bats. Lindy bet the environment with home-run darts and both team totals, and bet the mismatch with the Tigers run line. If you only take one thing to the window, take the read underneath all of it: the Detroit run line and Carter Jensen going quiet at +150 are the same bet told two ways, and the board will tell you which price is worth firing.
